Badlands (1973)

A charmless, tedious and unfunny movie that cultivates an image of — of all things — intelligence

Like Waiting for Guffman, which Christopher Guest directed and starred in four years ago, his new movie, Best in Show is painfully funny. Truly funny and truly painful. And very much in the same way too—in the way, that is, that toe-curling embarrassment is painful if you are involved in it and funny if you…

Nil By Mouth by Gary Oldman is a surprise. You would think that Hollywood’s favorite maniac villain — along with Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken — would have been infected with the Hollywood slicks, but here, in his first appearance as director, he is doing something altogether different — that is a sort of cinéma…

Like most Hollywood attempts at satire, Dick, directed by Andrew Fleming, falls into the fatal trap of becoming too cozy with the object of its satirical attentions. This is a pity because there are many good and funny things in it. It would have been a great movie if it could have kept its focus…

Just another po mo fantasy? Just another superhero movie? I’m afraid so.

The Eel, directed by Shohei Imamura, is like so many Japanese films a visual feast which works less well as a naturalistic drama than as a sort of moral parable, shot through with significant symbolism in mostly beautiful pictures. The story is of a midlevel Japanese “salaryman” called Yamashita (Koji Yakusho, who made such an…