Tag: Ryan O’Neal

  • Barry Lyndon (1975, Stanley Kubrick)

    The first half of Barry Lyndon, very nicely delineated on screen with a title card and then an intermission, is a black comedy. The second half is a tragedy. The epilogue explicitly reconciles the two, but there’s also Michael Hordern’s narration, which does the most expository work of anything in the picture. For the most…

  • An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (1997, Arthur Hiller)

    Besides being generally awful, the most annoying thing about An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn is how it never fluctuates. Once the director–Arthur Hiller took his name off, amusingly not as a publicity stunt but because of writer Joe Eszterhas–and Eszterhas’s script establish the rather paltry quality of the plot and the jokes, it…

  • The Driver (1978, Walter Hill)

    There are limits to how much patented Walter Hill machismo one person can take and The Driver pushes its limit early on. Well, maybe not too early on, since the movie runs ninety minutes. It doesn’t help Ryan O’Neal doesn’t talk, Isabelle Adjani chokes through her English dialogue, and Bruce Dern turns in an exceptionally…