Movie Reviews
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Martin Landau is Judah, a successful ophthalmologist who is having an affair with Anjelica Huston. He thinks he told her he would not leave his wife; she claims he had better leave her or she will expose the whole nasty thing, and also some financial improprieties he was stupid enough to tell her about. It’s a Fatal Attraction scenario as she gets crazier and ... Read more »
New York Stories
Three different stories by three different directors, held together only by the fact that all three take place on Manhattan Island.
- Life Lessons. Martin Scorsese’s contribution, and naturally, being Scorsese’s, it is the most serious of the trio. Nick Nolte is an abstract painter of some repute and wealth. Rosanna Arquette is his much-younger ... Read more »
Another Woman
Another Bergmanesque effort for Woody, and one of the better ones. Gena Rowlands is a professor who is writing a book, and rents a small apartment (Woody’s characters seldom have money problems) to get away from the construction noise in her own place. She soon discovers that she can hear conversations in the psychiatrist’s office next door through the heating vent. She covers the vent, ... Read more »
September
Inspired this time by Chekhov, Woody Allen here gives us a claustrophobic story of six people at a beach house that could have been, and maybe should have been, done on the stage. Mia Farrow is the daughter of an old has been warhorse actress (Elaine Stritch, who is about as abrasive a character as I’ve ever seen; she brays every line, and I hated her intensely). When she was fourteen she ... Read more »
Radio Days
There’s hardly anything you could call a plot in this movie … and it’s one of the great ones. Mia Farrow is a cigarette girl with a harsh, terrible accent straight off the streets. She takes voice lessons, and ends up a radio personality. That’s it for plot, and it’s just a small part of the movie. What it is, is an affectionate ode to old-time radio. Music, comedy, personalities, quiz ... Read more »
Hannah and Her Sisters
(OLD REVIEW) Woody Allen has written and directed 43 1/3 movies, pretty much one every year since 1966. He is in the enviable position of apparently not having to worry if they make a lot of money, since they don’t cost a lot to make. One film every year, like clockwork. Naturally, they vary in quality, and some will disagree on which are the best and which not so hot, but I think almost ... Read more »
The Purple Rose of Cairo
This is, IMHO, one of the better science fiction/fantasy movies ever made. It just makes you feel good … until the ending, which is a little too real, but certainly honest. It’s the 1930s, and Mia Farrow is a waitress living a hopeless life, married to a low-life drunk layabout blowhard abusive thug (Danny Aiello). She escapes to the local Bijou, where she watches a silly little movie ... Read more »
Broadway Danny Rose
… is a third-rate talent agent who represents fourth- and fifth-rate talent. Maybe that’s too harsh. Maybe the talent is sixth-rate, but Danny himself is not so bad. He’s a hard worker, and he is loyal. And he really believes in the losers he handles, like the one-legged tap dancer, the balloon-tying artists, the stuttering ventriloquist, or the blind magician. He works hard to ... Read more »
Zelig
It’s incredible to realize just how famous Leonard Zelig was in the 1920’s and ‘30s, and how almost totally forgotten he is today. They held a ticker-tape parade for him down Wall Street. They wrote dozens of songs about the Human Chameleon, and made up dances. There was the huge bigamy scandal, when it turned out that several of his personalities had married and fathered children. And of ... Read more »
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
Woody seems to have set out to make nothing more than a light entertainment here, a bon-bon, a fantasy, and that’s just what he delivered. Woody is an inventor who floats around in a couple of flying machines that obviously could never get off the ground. Six people gather around the turn of the century—1900—for a weekend at a swell old house. Jose Ferrer is a blowhard philosopher that ... Read more »