For once, the Academy Awards were tolerable-not the ceremony which was longer, more boring, and more Politically Correct than ever-but the awards themselves. The Unforgiven was neither my favorite picture...

Why Malcolm X? Why the sudden rage, replete with baseball caps inscribed with X's, for a man assassinated nearly thirty years ago? Partly it's media hype, centered around the new hagiographic movie made...

A charming movie, directed by Jon Avnet, about the rural South, now and in the old days. Outstanding acting by Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy and the rest of the cast. A paean to the old Southern way of life,...

The destruction of the Broadway musical can be dated as precisely as the advent of the late Wagnerian operas, and indeed the course of their decline unconsciously recapitulated the post-Wagnerian decay...

The appearance of what is unquestionably the funniest movie of the last several years (Blazing Saddles, dir. by and with Mel Brooks, and with Gene Wilder, Cleavon Little and Madeline Kahn), offers a welcome...

The brouhaha over this movie is ridiculous. This is not one of the Major Statements ofOur Time. Basically a film noira tough, sleazy cop-and-murder picture, differing from the old films noir by having...

Manhattan, dir. by and with Woody Allen

It is fittingly symbolic that I should be reviewing this superb film in the tenth anniversary issue of the Lib. Forum. My favorite movie critic, Andrew Sarris,...

You would think from the shock ofthe Respectable Media, that Stone's ]FK was totally outlandish, off-the-wall, monstrous and fanciful in its accusations against the American power structure. And you would...

Recently I saw two movies that presented a remarkable contrast. They are not at all similar in theme; but in structure and meaning they embody two diametrically opposed concepts of film-making, indeed...

The Old Culture returns in a warm, affectionate story about the American Girls' Professional Baseball League that was established by some baseball owners during World WarII and lasted until the early 1950s....

Hollywood has brought us two great, romantic genres, two forms of movies where the war of good versus evil could play itself out against a background of an entire complex fictive world grounded in a present...

An Unmarried Woman. Dir. and written by Paul Mazursky. With Jill Clayburgh and Alan Bates. Speaking of tedium, ideology, and narcissism with a female focus, if Julia qualifies as one of the worst big movies...

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. dir. by Michael Cimino. With Clint Eastwood. First, I have to report, as a dyed-in-the-wool Clint Eastwood fan, that this picture is a total disaster. It is not Clint Eastwood’s...

Social realism, we sometimes forget, does not have to be about the poor, the underclass, or upwardly mobile immigrants. Social realism, even in New York City can be about the glamorous, wealth)!, preppie...

Heralded and beloved by the left as Robert Altman's "comeback" movie, this "satire" on Hollywood is both unfunny and meretricious. Supposedly a critique ofHollywood's commercialism from the standpoint...

This brings me to The Piano, a movie which I fell into in a weak moment. The Piano is far and away the WorstMovie I have seen in many years, perhaps since what may well be the WorstMovie ofAllTime, the...

And yet anyone who tries to Learn About History by going to a Hollywood movie deserves to have his head examined. Did we really learn the true story of Moses by watching Charlton Heston, or by seeing the...

A wondrous, exuberant, very funny and heartwarming movie by the best new director in many a moon, Peter Chelsom, who also co-wrote the screenplay: A richly-textured show-business film set among Irish immigrants...

Since World War II, with only a few exceptions (usually the films of Eric Rohmer), French cinema has been, for all of us cultural reactionaries, abominable. Almost to a movie, they have been absurdist,...

Unless you're crazy about incomprehensible shuckin' and jivin'. The banal plot centers around the fact that Woody Harrelson, though white, can actually play good playground basketball. Harrelson and black...