Word: cinema
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...firm footing, and the underworld that waited for those who wavered and fell. By the end of his first few months in pictures, Cagney had made a name for himself with The Public Enemy. It was the movie in which he concluded the most famous breakfast scene in cinema history by squashing a grapefruit in Actress Mae Clarke's kisser...
Welcome to regional-theater cinema, where locale is a crucial character, the pace is measured in eye drops, and everyone on both sides of the camera aspires to the ordinary. As playwright (The Trip to Bountiful) and screenwriter (Tender Mercies), Horton Foote has backpacked over this terrain for two generations. On Valentine's Day, the prequel (though not the equal) of last year's 1918, marks one more stroll through Foote's family plot. Again we find the Vaughn and Robedaux families forcing smiles and small talk as the Great War rages 5,000 miles from their southeastern Texas town...
...There are ranker implausibilities, and sadder ironies, in this egregious comedy-drama. Life and death, both contrived, salt the plot; the dialogue freezes in the actors' mouths like psychobabble on a stick; the picture remains immune even to another silk-purse performance by Lahti, the American cinema's best hope for a smart, mature, vulnerable funny woman of the '80s. Mary Tyler Moore carried that standard handsomely through the '70s in a sitcom co-created by Allan Burns, who wrote and directed Just Between Friends. To see them flail here is like running into your dream girl a decade later...
Fighting words, and Mayor Townsend has some of her own. "It's not entertainment," she sniffs. Dismissing Eastwood as "our cinema star," she says, "I understand that young women are rushing out of restaurants to assault him." That has been happening to Eastwood, 55, since he first sauntered across television screens in 1959 as Rowdy Yates on Rawhide and, in the mid-'60s, appeared as the taut-jawed, tight-lipped hero of three movies dubbed spaghetti westerns. But it is clearly not the kind of scene that the mayor likes to see playing in Carmel...
...contemporary filmdom, happy endings come few and far between. Thus the promise of one--apparent from the film's start--should attract those alienated by the present trend of realistic cinema. Yet this Room with a View gives its audience more than a string of paired couples and crescending music at the close. An insightful study of character and society, this version of the Forster classic is not to be missed...