Michael Kirby Movies

Nearly three decades after the cancellation of the original Untouchables TV series, Robert Stack reprises his role as gangbuster Eliot Ness, who returns from retirement to hunt for the killer of a former colleague and finds himself caught in a war between rival mob kingpins in 1947 Chicago. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Tom Kalin directed this cool and aloof black-and-white study of the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, a case told before in two previous films -- Rope and Compulsion. In 1924, in Chicago, Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, two 18-year-olds, kidnapped and murdered the 13-year-old Bobby Franks, immediately killing him and then stuffing his naked body up a culvert. The motive for the crime was simply that they wanted to prove to themselves that they were smart enough to get away with it. The previous film versions downplayed Leopold and Loeb's homosexuality, but Kalin's version plays it up into a psychosexual motif. Loeb (Daniel Schlachet) is the calculating intellectual, while Leopold (Craig Chester), the amateur ornithologist, is the emotional and weak one. In love with Loeb, Leopold is willing to do anything for him, and when Leob uses the withholding of sex as a prompt, Leopold is even willing to commit murder to have his sexual desires satisfied by Loeb. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

In this comedy from writer-director John Boorman, wealthy real estate mogul Stewart McBain (Dabney Coleman) owns a demolition firm which specializes in blowing up old buildings to make way for upscale new ones. When neighbors protest his plans to raze a dilapidated old building to make way for a new Brooklyn subdivision, television crews film the confrontation, and McBain comes off like a fool. His three spoiled children ridicule him. Tired of their carping, McBain gives them each $750 and drops them off at the old building, known as the Dutch House. Daphne (Uma Thurman), Chloe (Suzy Amis) and Jimmy (David Hewlett) are at first completely lost, because they have no idea how to live in the real world. As McBain and his wife Jean (Joanna Cassidy) monitor their children's progress, the three youngsters learn to get along with the neighborhood people and eventually set up a commune of sorts, into which they invite their friends and various homeless people. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

The Golden Boat, the first American production from internationally acclaimed director Raul Ruiz, is a dry-humored, surreal tale set in downtown Manhattan. Young writer Israel Williams (Federico Muchnik) encounters a wounded man on the street. Though he has been stabbed several times over, the man seems unaffected by his wounds and refuses to go to a doctor. Instead, he asks Israel to help find his estranged son. Israel reluctantly agrees but is met with disbelief and suspicion from the supposed son, a South American television star. Things become dangerously complicated when the old man proves to be a murderer with shady criminal and political connections. Israel soon becomes lost in a strange world of international celebrities, Marxist operatives, and postmodern literary critics. The film deconstructs traditional techniques, relying instead on unconventional cinematography, jarring sound design, and eccentric patterns of recurring imagery, including several pairs of boots that reappear in odd places throughout the film. Ruiz made The Golden Boat on a shoestring budget, working in collaboration with The Kitchen, an avant-garde theatre group. Several notable members of the New York art scene make cameos, including director Jim Jarmusch and writer Kathy Acker. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide

Grad-school administrative head Marion Post (Gena Rowlands) is in the midst of writing a book. The walls are thin in the apartment she's taken for work purposes, and soon Marion begins listening to the sessions conducted by her neighbor, an analyst. One of the patients is Hope (Mia Farrow), whose marriage is in tatters. As Hope prattles on, Marion begins flashing back to highlights (and lowlights) of her own marriage. Her musings are constantly interrupted by the memory of the man (Gene Hackman) she'd once ardently loved. Later on, chance encounters with old friends force Marion to face the fact that she has lived her life sheltering herself from her true emotions. Director Woody Allen's career-long indebtedness to Ingmar Bergman is underlined in Another Woman via Bergman's frequent cinematographer Sven Nykvist. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Agency tackles the question of the efficiency of media manipulation. An unscrupulous advertising agency, in league with equally untrustworthy political campaign manager Robert Mitchum, plants subliminal messages in its TV commercials. Just as Vance Packard warned in the 1950s expose The Hidden Persuaders, these hidden messages persuade the viewers to vote for Mitchum's candidate. Given the potency of the the film's premise, it's disappointing to watch director George Gaczender handle the material (based on a novel by Paul Gottleib) is so cut-and-dried a fashion. But Mitchum is good, as are his costars Valerie Perrine, Lee Majors, Saul Rubinek and Alexandra Stewart. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Set at a low-end summer camp and aimed squarely at a teen audience, Meatballs is a light screwball comedy that turned its low-budget Canadian roots into a very profitable box-office run. The biggest reason for the film's success is Bill Murray who stars as Tripper, the head counselor who runs things at Camp Northstar with the help of his love interest Roxanne (Kate Lynch) and the camp's director Morty (Harvey Atkins), who is affectionately known as Mickey. Camp opens with Tripper and Morty preparing the misfit counselors-in-training -- Spaz, Fink, Crockett, A.L., Candace, Wendy, and Wheels among them -- for the arrival of their hyperactive little charges. After settling in, kids and counselors begin their activities with a soccer game in which depressed 11-year-old Rudy (Chris Makepeace) accidentally loses the game. Cast out by the other children, Rudy runs away only to come across Tripper, who befriends the boy and makes him his running partner. Romance, sexy fun, and comic hijinx -- usually with the heavy-sleeping Morty as their target -- lead up to an annual Olympiad in which Camp Northstar battles the wealthier and athletically superior residents of Camp Mohawk. The challenging events include cup stacking, potato-sack racing, and a nauseating hot dog-eating contest in which the portly Fink devours his way to victory. With the two-day event tied up, it comes down to the cross-country run, in which Tripper enters Rudy. Meatballs was the first major directorial effort by multi-talented filmmaker Ivan Reitman, whose name has since become synonymous with the comedy genre. ~ Patrick Legare, All Movie Guide

The Canadian "sleeper" The Silent Partner stars Elliott Gould as a teller, Miles Cullen, who figures out psycho Harry Reikle's (Christopher Plummer) scheme to rob his bank, several days ahead of time. Cullen providently squirrels away 50,000 dollars in a safety-deposit box before Reikle strikes. After the robbery, the papers report the amount of the bank's loss. Reikle realizes that there's 50,000 extra bucks floating around that he hasn't gotten his hands on. The soft-spoken but sadistic Reikle puts the screws on Cullen to fork over the dough -- but Cullen has lost the deposit-box key. Be forewarned: this one gets extremely brutal and bloody at times, with sudden bursts of graphic violence. Also featured is Susannah York as the fluctuating-loyalty heroine, and a very young and hairy John Candy. Future L.A. Confidential scribe Curtis Hanson loosely adapted the Danish novel Think of a Number, by Anders Bodelsen. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Here's the basic "shtick" of Bugsy Malone: it's a gangster picture enacted by children. Acted out before scaled-down sets, the film details the career of Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio), who rises to the top of the criminal ladder in 1920s New York. Whenever gunfire is called for, the kiddie crooks substitute whipped cream for bullets. Paul Williams contributes several songs, which are performed by adult singers and lip-synched by the pint-sized actors. The cast includes John Cassisi as diminutive Capone clone Fat Sam, and then-13-year-old Jodie Foster as the sultry nightclub thrush Tallulah. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This adaptation of "The Bacchae" by Euripides seems to be a collection of black and white home movies using hand held cameras. The filming and editing was done by Brian De Palma, but nothing distinguishes the film from being a filmed stage performance of writhing and groaning amateur actors and actresses. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

When Homecoming was first released in 1948, some observers felt that Clark Gable's unusually sensitive performance was based on his own memories of losing his wife Carole Lombard in a 1942 plane crash. Intriguingly, Gable's Homecoming co-star is Lana Turner, with whom it was rumored that he was having an affair at the time of Lombard's death. Told in flashback, the story concerns the romance of war-time army surgeon Ulysses Delby Johnson (Gable) and Red Cross nurse Lt. Jane "Snapshot" McCall (Turner). Though married, Johnson cannot help to be drawn to Jane as they slog through the hellish battlegrounds of Italy and France. As the war draws to a close, Johnson is faced with a dilemma: how can he find happiness with Jane without bringing misery to his beloved wife Penny (Anne Baxter). As it turns out, Fate intervenes to solve Johnson's problem. Though well-acted and directed, Homecoming is just too thin to be spread out over 12 reels. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide