“Charmer”

The English comedy A PRIVATE FUNCTION is like an Ealing Studios comedy of the late-forties, early-fifties period as it might have been skewed by Joe Orton. The picture keeps adding greedy eccentrics and scatological jokes until everything is interconnected and the action seems on the verge of exploding into lewd farce. It never quite makes the final leap (there's something very English about that), but it's pretty funny anyway. The dialogue doesn't let you down. Alan Bennett, who wrote…

“Charmer”

Mia Farrow seems just naturally stylized. Weightlessly beautiful, and with a considerable acting technique that she draws upon without the slightest show of effort, she might have been created for the camera. She's both real and unreal—she has a preternatural glowing sweetness. In THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, which Woody Allen wrote for her and directed, she is Cecilia, who lives in a small town in New Jersey.
It's 1935, and her husband is unemployed; he fritters away his…

“Out There and In Here”

“Maybe I’m sick, but I want to see that again.”
—Overheard after a showing of BLUE VELVET.

When you come out of the theatre after seeing David Lynch's BLUE VELVET you certainly know that you've seen something. You wouldn't mistake frames from BLUE VELVET for frames from any other movie. It's an anomaly—the work of a genius naïf. If you feel that there's very little art between you and the filmmaker's psyche, it may be…

The Theories of R.D. Laing, the poet of schizophrenic despair, have such theatrical flash that they must have hit John Cassavetes smack in the eye. His new film, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, is the work of a disciple: it's a didactic illustration of Laing's vision of insanity, with Gena Rowlands as Mabel Longhetti, the scapegoat of a repressive society that defines itself as normal. The core of the film is a romanticized conception of insanity, allied with the ancient…