Sylvia Anderson Movies
Nominated for seven Academy Awards, Norman Jewison has directed some of Hollywood's most acclaimed and beloved movies such as Moonstruck, Fiddler on the Roof, and In the Heat of the Night. This video profile of his life and career features interviews with Whoopi Goldberg, Rod Steiger, and Sylvester Stallone. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
As actor, director, and executive producer, Sydney Pollack has been involved with some of Hollywood's most acclaimed works including Tootsie, Out of Africa, and Three Days of the Condor. This video profile highlights his life and career. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
From playing Meathead in All in the Family to directing such cult classics as This is Spinal Tap and Misery, Rob Reiner is one of Hollywood's most popular directors. This video profile highlights his life and career. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Part of the Directors series, which profiles the careers of some of the world's most powerful movie directors, Directors: Joel Schumacher looks at the work of Hollywood director Joel Schumacher. With a variety of funny and dramatic films to his credit, including Car Wash (1976), The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1978), Falling Down (1993), and Batman Forever (1995), Schumacher has a reputation for box-office success. Kevin Bacon, Uma Thurman, Chris O'Donnell, Nicole Kidman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and others are interviewed. ~ Betsy Boyd, All Movie Guide
- 1994
After a dalliance with a government official, Patsy (Joanna Lumley) becomes embroiled in a tabloid sex scandal and is irate to see her true age reported nationally. "Borrowing" the Monsoon house for an interview with Hello magazine, she is disappointed to learn that photos for the spread won't be shot until the following week. However, when Edina (Jennifer Saunders) stubs her toe and enters the hospital for minor surgery, Pats takes the opportunity to accompany her and undergo a quick face peel. Finding the accommodations less than deluxe and ridiculed by a pair of wise-cracking nurses (Llewella Gideon and Orla Brady), Edina pops painkillers like candy and falls into a disturbing fugue in which her friends and family appear to her in the guise of British celebrities, from Helena Bonham-Carter to Germaine Greer -- both of whom have been the subject of ridicule on previous episodes. Awakening from her dreams to find that her surgery has already been completed, Eddy learns that her injuries were even more minor than they appeared; Patsy's face peel, however, doesn't generate quite such a happy outcome, nor does her debut in the pages of Hello. Originally broadcast on BBC 1 on January 27, 1994, Absolutely Fabulous: Hospital marked series two, episode one of this popular Brit-com. Suzi Quatro, Mandy Rice-Davies, Richard E. Grant, and Sylvia Anderson joined Bonham-Carter and Greer in the cast of cameo stars. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
- 1979
- PG
In this action-packed drama, a beautiful singer decides to put her career on hold when her younger brother, who had a problem with drugs, is severely beaten by a gang of dope dealers. She assembles a group of seven beautiful crime fighters, and they hit the road in their customized van looking for an opportunity to break open the drug ring run by Farrell (Jack Palance) and Burke (Peter Lawford). The inarguably remarkable supporting cast includes Alan Hale Jr., Pat Buttram, Jim Backus, Neville Brand and Arthur Godfrey. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- 1979
It's the ladies to the rescue in the low-budget actioner Angel's Brigade. Wearing form-fitting fatigues, the female stars play a team of highly trained avengers. Their mission: to wipe every drug dealer off the face of the earth. To accomplish this, they drive around in a custom-built van, decked out with the latest in high-tech weaponry. You've never heard of any of the leading ladies in Angel's Brigade, but the supporting cast is overloaded with such pop-culture celebs as Jack Palance, Peter Lawford, Jim Backus, Neville Brand, Pat Buttram, Alan Hale Jr, and Arthur Godfrey. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1976
In Randal Kleiser's telemovie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, Eve Plumb stars as Dawn, who leaves home at 15 for the glamour of L.A. Friendless, she is taken in by the smooth line of Swan (Bo Hopkins), who offers to be her protector. Before long, Dawn has become a streetwalker, with Swan taking a sizeable chunk of her earnings. She finds true friendship in the form of another runaway, male hustler Alex (Leigh McCloskey) -- whose own story would be delineated in a 1977 sequel, Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn. Having learned a lesson with its controversial airing of Born Innocent, NBC preceded the September 27, 1976, premiere of Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway with a "parental discretion" disclaimer. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1976
This '70s drive-in classic was directed by prolific Filipino filmmaker Cirio Santiago. The plot concerns a trio of female athletes who are snatched from the Hong Kong Olympics and sold into white slavery, whereupon they use martial arts and blazing guns to defeat their tormentors. Familiar drive-in starlets Rosanne Katon and Colleen Camp are the headliners in this murky-looking film which features some entertaining fight scenes but suffers from poor production values and extended scenes in the Philippine Tagalog language without benefit of subtitles. Advertisements referred to the stars as "3 Foxy Mamas Turned Loose," despite the fact that one of the three is killed fairly early in the film. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
- 1975
This sci-fi adventure was the pilot for a television series Space: 1999. It is set in the next century just after an enormous blast from an alien ship destroys half the moon and sends the rest hurtling through space. Unfortunately, upon the chunk of speeding rock is the research station Alpha which contains 311 people helmed by cool-headed Commander Koenig. Now the Alpha castaways must not only continue to survive, they must also keep up on their research to discover what happened and why. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1975
Space: 1999 was one of the more visible sci-fi disasters of early-'70s television, although it started out with some promising credentials. It was produced by Gerry Anderson and Sylvia Anderson, who had been responsible for several fondly remembered series such as Supercar, Fireball XL-5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet & the Mysterons, and Thunderbirds, all built around marionettes and utilizing superb special effects and model work. The Andersons had also produced one intermittently engaging live-action series, UFO, and a fine feature film, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. The series starred Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, who were the closest thing to a power-couple among television actors in those days (from their work together on Mission: Impossible) and Barry Morse, an excellent Canadian actor. Moreover, the producers started with what, in those days, was an admirable and challenging goal -- to create a television series that tried to follow in the footsteps of 2001: A Space Odyssey (then less than a decade old), mixing lunar settings, interstellar adventure, and a profound sense of cosmic wonder. The story of Moonbase Alpha and its crew, blasted into deep space when the nuclear waste deposited on the moon propelled the satellite out of orbit, was a silly, but intriguing, one once the audience got past the notion of the moon moving fast enough to reach interstellar space. The series never found a balance between its cosmic consciousness and the need for a steady dose of action each week, and once it underwent a major retooling of its cast for the second season, the smell of broadcast death hung over Space: 1999 for the remainder of its run. The presence of the first episode, alas, shows the shortcomings of even the superior first season that followed: After a good thriller plot for the opener, comprised of straightforward action and presenting well-delineated characters, the show came to rely heavily on plots involving lots of pseudo-science, symbolic illusions, and alien machinations, and never properly interwove its action with its philosophical ponderings. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, (more)
- 1969
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A previously unknown planet is discovered within our solar system, orbiting on the far side of the sun exactly opposite the position of the Earth, and at precisely the same speed. The European space agency Eurosec, headed by Jason Webb (Patrick Wymark), whose solar probe made the discovery, decides to send a manned mission to investigate, teaming America's top astronaut Glenn Ross (Roy Thinnes) and British astro-physicist John Kane (Ian Hendry). Their voyage aboard the space vehicle Phoenix is supposed to take six weeks, but when the ship returns to orbit in only three weeks -- ending in a crash of their landing vehicle that kills Kane -- Eurosec can only conclude that Ross has engaged in some sort of sabotage. The astronaut is at a loss as to how they could have done a round-trip in just three weeks, until he makes a startling discovery -- that everything that he sees, from the layout of rooms and buildings to all of the writing around him, is reversed, left to right and right to left. It takes Ross, amid his confusion, to arrive at the only possible conclusion -- that he and Kane did, indeed, journey to the new planet, and that world is a duplicate of Earth (and visa versa) down to the last molecule, a perfect mirror-image; and that world dispatched its own mission, with its own Ross and Kane. He and Webb, and Eurosec, scarcely have time to absorb the implications of this discovery -- if true -- as they prepare for a return flight for Ross, despite enormous risks and some potentially very dangerous unknowns in getting him back to the Phoenix. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Roy Thinnes, Patrick Wymark, (more)
This animated, futuristic puppet fantasy finds Lady Penelope and Professor Brains working for the organization International Rescue. The professor has developed an aircraft for the New World Aircraft company. Corporate spies secretly working for the NWA organization steal the experimental flyer. The Lady and the Professor chase the villains around the world in their quest to return the plane to the rightful owners in this action-packed children's feature. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Sylvia Anderson, Ray Barrett, (more)
- 1968
Produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, Joe 90 was a popular British adventure series about a 9-year-old espionage agent. As with the Andersons' previous efforts (Supercar, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Fireball XL-5), the series "starred" a coterie of marionettes, animated via a complicated electronic process known as Supermarionation. The series premiered on British television in 1968, and was syndicated in the U.S. the following year. Some of the best moments from the Joe 90 episodes have been assembled in this 93-minute feature. When Joe 90 folded, the Andersons moved into live action with UFO and Space: 1999. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
This British sci-fi film is based on a popular British television series Thunderbirds. The characters are portrayed by special marionettes. The story centers on the exploits of International Rescue, who use spaceships to save beautiful Lady Penelope from her kidnappers, the evil villains of New World Aircraft Corporation ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
