Breaking Away (1979)

What a lot of fantastical narrative machinery is employed to make an embarrassingly banal point

The eighth in the series which has become an unprecedented achievement of the documentarian’s art

Detroit Rock City, written by Carl V. Dupré and directed by Adam Rifkin, is a loathsome movie about which I have nothing more to say than to marvel that anything like it could be made today. There is a lot that is wrong about the movies of our own time, but to give them their…

Conceptual art comes to the movies, bringing with it a newish sort of excuse for watching pornography

Like its predecessor, Toy Story 2 is a triumph of technology — the relatively new technology of computer animation — if not of moviemaking. In fact, as a kind of technological marvel it is naturally impervious to criticism on any merely airy-fairy, aesthetic grounds. Like the Bond films with which it might otherwise be thought…

There are two perfect, transcendent moments in the Tale of Autumn, or Conte d’Automne, which is the fourth and perhaps the best of Eric Rohmer’s magisterial series, “Tales of the Four Seasons.” The first of these is when we suddenly realize that the simple story of two women, married Isabelle (Marie Rivière) and her divorced…