Bullwhip Griffin

"Bullwhip Griffin" is a pleasant, low-key adventure comedy, good summer entertainment for youngsters and perhaps not too unlikely for their parents. If it isn't quite up to Walt Disney's best comedies ("The Absent-Minded Professor," for example), it is good Disney all the same, and many of the Disney trademarks are in evidence.The hero from the kid's point of view, I suspect, is Jack Flagg (Bryan Russell), an impossibly noble 12-year-old with blue eyes, scrubbed cheeks and the mature…

The Endless Summer

The peculiar charm of "The Endless Summer" is something I haven't got quite worked out in my mind yet. This is all the more strange because here, at last, is a completely uncomplicated film, fresh and natural, designed only to please. It does. Why?Part of the answer may be in the unconventional approach of the filmmaker, Bruce Brown. He packed a 16-mm camera and assorted telephoto lenses into a suitcase and set off around the world one…

The Straight Story

The first time I saw "The Straight Story," I focused on the foreground and liked it. The second time I focused on the background, too, and loved it. The movie isn't just about the old Alvin Straight's odyssey through the sleepy towns and rural districts of the Midwest, but about the people he finds to listen and care for him. You'd think it was a fantasy, this kindness of strangers, if the movie weren't based on a…

Mulholland Drive

David Lynch has been working toward "Mulholland Drive" all of his career, and now that he's arrived there I forgive him "Wild at Heart" and even "Lost Highway." At last his experiment doesn't shatter the test tubes. The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can't stop watching it.It tells the story of . . . well, there's no way to finish that…