Word: climaxes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hiller does not manage to synthesize the opposing personalities of this film until the very end, in possibly the worst climax to scar a movie in many years. A teen-exploitation film rarely has trouble finding a good reason for its female leads to take off their clothes, and you might have thought you had seen them all. As Teachers rolls to its much anticipated end, we find that Nolte has finally decided to bag teaching for something more suitable to his talents, like All-Star wrestling. In order to convince him to stay, Williams strips to the buff...
...bride. That impression is heightened by the best and perhaps most autobiographical scenes, as the narrator recalls a childhood of willful rudeness and neglect by his father, accompanied by pitiable flirtation from his mother. Yet just when Arlen, working through the accumulation of small, freighted moments, reaches an apparent climax, the ruminative and wistful tone turns frantic. In the culmination of a night of frenzied incident, the father is shot and gravely wounded by a romantic rival, and the aggrieved son abruptly turns prayerful. Arlen rescues the novel from pathos with the scene he seems to have had in mind...
...Until a climax too calculated to stir the emotions, Screenwriter William D Wittliff and Director Richard Pearce navigate a careful, dogged course between tract and treacle. In this near-miss movie Shepard is once again the icon of incorruptibility who refuses to claim the center of a film. Toward the end of Country Shepard's character disappears, with little explanation, in what may be a gentlemanly bow to Jessica Lange, a flinty, landsomely wasted matriarch. Mother ones, meet Ma Joad. -By Richard Corliss...
Against lush backdrops of the Viennese court, Tom Hulce creates an energetic Mozart, frivolous on all concerns save music. As Saleri, F. Murray Abraham creates an ideal counterpart: a composer as measured, reasonable, and altogether average as his rival is extraordinary. Their prickly relationship reaches a moving climax in the film's final minutes, with a scene that mesmerizingly unravels the fabric of admiration and betrayal between...
...wanted to believe that this person is Mozart, is Salieri, not just an actor playing a part." Believe who will. The fact remains that Hulce and Abraham move assuredly to the center of this glittery production, finding the souls of their characters and then, at the film's climax, exchanging them...