Word: burstyn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...characters are Doris (Ellen Burstyn) and George (Alan Alda), strangers who meet at a motel and end up in bed. Though married to others, the hero and heroine continue their affair on a one-weekend-per-year basis. Luckily, Writer Bernard Slade monitors the couple at five-year rather than annual intervals...
...only dignity in the film comes from Ellen Burstyn, who skillfully recreates her stage role. Playing the part originated by Charles Grodin, Alda gives a surprisingly weak performance: his usual warmth is vitiated by too many shrill farcical tantrums. Still, it's hard to blame an actor for this debacle. The only way to win playing Same Time, Next Year is to refuse to play...
...Hitchcock, or even a DePalma. Friedkin and Blatty successfully induce nausea, not terror--unless you're one of the impressionable innocents who gave this film its reputation, in which case, frankly, you have no taste. An excellent performance by Max Von Sydow, a pretty good one by Ellen Burstyn, a lifeless one by Jason Miller (who should stick to--or rather go back to--writing plays), and one by Linda Blair that is as disgusting as anything else in the movie...
Mercouri plays a fading film star who returns to her native Greece to appear in Medea and also in a TV film about her preparation for the role. As a publicity stunt she arranges to visit, in jail, an American woman (Ellen Burstyn) who, like Medea, has committed infanticide. What with a demanding rehearsal schedule and the raging and pouting she inflicts on her director and her entourage, you would think the Mercouri character would have no time left to feel guilty about exploiting the half-mad murderess, but she does. Repeatedly she goes back into the prison...
...Burstyn's understated performance as a simple, Bible-spouting woman driven crazy by her husband's philandering is the movie's single redeeming feature. Otherwise there is nothing emotionally or intellectually involving here. Unless, of course, one is interested in some "personal statements" about the state of the movie business, contemporary issues and the star and director themselves that they manage to tuck in along the way. It perhaps need not be added that these are of a piece with the rest of A Dream of Passion-awkward, pretentious and empty...