John Patterson

PAISLEY SHIRTS AND POLKA DOTS, ORGY SCENES AND acid trips, superstars and superspies, Beatle boots and Bond birds, aitch-dropping working-class pop stars, lisping convent-schooled cover girls, beady-eyed music impresarios, randy fashion photographers, media-made instant celebs: Jesus, you think, they must have been everywhere. And sustained exposure to "Mods and Rockers,"......

Photo Debra DiPaoloPARAMOUNT STUDIOS, STAGE 15. A BELL rings for silence, and cries of "Rolling!" echo around the set of William Friedkin's military thriller Rules of Engagement. Samuel Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones ease into character as the clammy silence of a U-boat is punctuated by Jones' distant bark. "Cut!"......

Photo by John P. JohnsonTHE EMPTY MIRROR, BARRY J. HERSHEY'S COMPLEX, visually overwhelming portrait of Adolf Hitler, is preoccupied by, among other things, the culpability of filmed images in assisting Germany's graduated descent into depravity. In an attempt to extract Hitler from our collective demonology, and from his current, near-meaningless......

1970. IT'S NIGHT IN NEWCASTLE, A NORTHERN English city of slums and postindustrial decay. Just in from London, gangster Jack Carter, played by a thuggish Michael Caine, walks into a big, ugly pub. Later, to avenge the death of his brother Frank, he will pit two rival gangster factions against......

It beggars belief that black filmmakers only started to secure a foothold at Hollywood's managerial level about 10 years ago, a full generation after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Behind this tardy post-Spike development lurks the bitter memory that the '70s boom in black filmmaking - for which blaxploitation was......

Don DeLillo's White Noise features a miracle drug that literalizes the meaning of words for the user: If someone yells, "Fusillade of bullets!" the terrified patient dives frantically for cover. In Bill Plympton's intoxicating new animated feature, I Married a Strange Person, a dronelike accountant named Grant has the same......