They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those [...]
Archive for November, 1978
Movie Movie (1978)
At a moment when the movies were changing fast in the wake of the auteur era and certainly in the wake of the success of Star Wars, it must have been a great temptation to want to rewind the clock. The reliability of Hollywood’s Golden Age is always a temptation for movie producers mainly because […]
The Lord of the Rings (1978)
I arrive at Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings with a great many mixed feelings. This is a film of so much style, so much imagination, so much ambition, yet I find myself trapped by the unavoidable conclusion that this movie is flawed beyond the point of no return. Its animation style wavers back […]
Slow Dancing in the Big City (1978)
[written November 8, 2004] Nearly every review that I have read of John G. Avildsen’s Snow Dancing in the Big City resorts to affectionately calling it ‘cornball’. It’s cornball and shmaltzy, they seem to agree, but functionally so. I’ve seen the movie, and while I can agree with the assessment, I must admit that, for […]
The Wild Geese (1978)
I saw The Wild Geese for the first time on a crummy old UHF station when I was a kid and even then I knew that this movie was a dumpster fire. It says a lot when an action movie is too stupid to even keep the attention of a 9-year-old, but here we are. […]
Magic (1978)
There must have been, I can imagine, a great temptation to turn a movie like Magic into a freak show, an exercise in exploitation that is free of restraint. God forbid, perhaps even a movie that respects the intelligence of the audience. This is, after all, the story of a ventriloquist being controlled by his […]
Caravans (1978)
Caravans is the kind of movie made by, and for, people who constantly say “Why don’t they make movies like that anymore,” and then when you see them you realize why. As throwbacks go, it seems like a noble effort but how soon we forget that certain ideas, certain styles, certain ways of making things […]
