NON-ACTORS STORM HOLLYWOOD
Wanted: movie stars. No experience needed. From Leon Trotsky to Oprah Winfrey, non-actors have brought a dangerous vitality to the movie screen. Marc Mancini burrows into the archives for a comprehensive and entertaining history of real people in fiction films. Now how about The Cory Aquino Story?
A NEW ARGENTINA
Norma Aleandro won the New York Film Critics’ prize for best actress, and her film The Official Story looks sure to cop an Oscar. Those are welcome signs for an Argentine cinema just escaping years of dictatorial rule. Pat Aufderheide scans recent Argentine films and finds energy, quality, and contradictions in equal measure
LISTEN TO BRITAIN
The proclamation of British Film Year didn’t have much to do with it, but the last twelve months have seen a quirky renaissance of English pictures, from David Hare’s subversive attacks on empire Terry Gilliam’s Brazil to the TV films 28 Up and My Beautiful Laundrette. David Thomson creates a mosaic of critical impressions of his tattered Emerald Isle, and ours
MIDSECTION: WHEN THE GAZE IS GAY
Out of the closet, into the Cuisinart. Gays in mainstream films are still either blended into pastel niceness or sent screaming to picturesque grotesquerie. In his provocative lead story for our Midsection on gay men and women on both sides of the camera, Vito Russo defines the problem
Marcia Pally examines films on lesbian themes
Gregg Kilday considers the dilemma of homosexual actors in Hollywood
And Darrell Yates Rist looks at the perception of AIDS on movies and on TV
JOURNALS
Patrizia von Brandenstein, first woman to win an Oscar for art direction, erects a dream house for The Money Pit. Carlos Clarens and Mary Corliss report
OSCAR MIRE
Nobody’s yawning this year. Excitement and perplexity run high as the Academy Awards approach, and our experts (Ansen, Byron, Kilday, Jacobson, Pollock, Sarris, Schickel, Schiff, Thompson, Turan) peer into a cloudy crystal ball
“OUT OF AFRICA”
By Richard Corliss
This is the dawning of the Age of Facetiousness. So three cheers for an epic that dares to take its viewers seriously
JAMES FOLEY AT CLOSE RANGE
Interviewed by Dan Yakir
Guy makes tough movies: the panting teen screen Reckless, and now an angry family saga starring Sean Penn and Christopher Walken. James Foley must be a tough guy too. And his favorite film is 101 Dalmations
“LE MYSTERE PICASSO”
Now playing: the movie that was 30 years ahead of its time about the artist who was 50 years ahead of his. Leonard Klady has the archaeological scoop
ELEVENTH ANNUAL GROSSES GLOSS
Even with Rambos and Spielbergs, the bottom line made everybody feel down and out in Beverly Hills. Anne Thompson charts ’85’s hits and flops
1985 FILM COMMENT INDEX
TELEVISION
Jack Barth loves Andy Griffith. The Andy Griffith Show, actually, and its Mayberry denizens, who are reuniting for a May special. He also mourns the decline of the humanist sitcom—but then, he hasn’t seen Foley Square
SOUNDTRACK
Ry Cooder has made sweet, sinewy music for director Walter Hill, and never more so than in the new Crossroads. Elvis Mitchell launches a new column with this fond Ry tribute
ORBITS: WILLARD VAN DYKE
Austin Lamont recalls a man of all arts, a filmmaker and a friend
BACK PAGE: Quiz #18
