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- <text>
- <title>
- (1983) Cinema
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1983 Highlights
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- January 2, 1984
- CINEMA
- BEST OF '83
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>Berlin Alexanderplatz. The harsh twilight of an amiable brute
- (Gunter Lamprecht) presages the arrival of Nazism's long night.
- Rainer Werner Fassbinder's mesmerizing 15 1/2-hour film is a
- masterpiece of social and sexual misanthropy.
- </p>
- <p>The Big Chill. Seven survivors of the '60s meet for a weekend
- to find a little warmth in the not so simple '80s. Aided by a
- resourceful case, Writer-Director Lawrence Kasdan revives some
- old-fashioned movie virtues; grace, wit, subtlety, style.
- </p>
- <p>Heart Like a Wheel. This B-movie biography of Shirley
- Muldowney, first woman to become a national hot-rod champion,
- boasts crisp, compassionate direction by Jonathan Kaplan and an
- Oscar-worthy performance from Bonnie Bedelia.
- </p>
- <p>The Night of the Shooting Stars. In 1944, a score of Tuscan
- villagers flee from the Nazis into a landscape of nightmare
- poetry. Italian Film Makers Paolo and Vittoria Taviani find
- aspects of nobility in every eccentric peasant.
- </p>
- <p>La Nuit de Varennes. Louis XVI's flight from the French
- Revolution is acutely observed by Director Ettore Scola, who
- concludes that history is an accident, ideology an irony,
- humanity's greatest blessing its distractibility.
- </p>
- <p>Star 80. Coolly, precisely but with hypnotic power, Bob Fosse
- converts Playmate Dorothy Stratten's murder into a harrowing
- tragedy of manners and a tale about the killing power of sleazy
- dreams.
- </p>
- <p>Tender Mercies. A country singer touches bottom and finds that
- it consists of good Texas earth in which he can reroot his
- humanity. Actor Robert Duvall warms and graces Screenwriter
- Horton Foote's tale with his lived-in face and a performance as
- raw as a Hank Williams ballad.
- </p>
- <p>Terms of Endearment. Morals, mortality, even a mid-life crisis
- or two are all subjects for James L. Brooks' rich, sweet, sad
- comedy. Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger strike sparks and
- smiles as the middle-American mother and daughter.
- </p>
- <p>Yentl. Gotta sing! Gotta dance! Gotta study that Talmud!!
- Filling every function but set decorator on this lavish musical,
- Barbra Streisand transforms a tale of the shtetl into a moving
- metaphor for her own determination and talent.
- </p>
- <p>Zelig. Technically bedazzling, Woody Allen's parody of
- square-cut documentary is also a hard-edged examination of the
- way modern celebrity rituals, magnified by the media, bend
- people's minds and perhaps deaden their hearts.</p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-