Abel Ferrara's slick 1993 adaptation of Jack Finney's páranoid sci-fi novel about human beings being replaced in their sleep by alien duplicates is the third screen version, and surprisingly good considering the director was compromised by the studio's desperation for a hit. Ferrara relocates the action to a military base, and Gabrielle Anwar and Meg Tilly are among those being menaced. The SFX are gross but impressive.
Sidney Pollack directed, Coppola co-wrote, Natalie Wood, Robert Redford and Charles Bronson star; how come it's so disappointing? A Tennessee Williams adaptation, Wood plays a dreamy but slinky belle in a stifling Southern smalltown boarding house. She falls for golden stranger Redford?then gets left behind. Hard to swallow, but Wood is highly watchable, and the cinematography is exemplary.
Slightly crass 60th-anniversary edition of a six-year-old flick?a marketing gimmick that rewrites Spielberg's war record by rooting his movie in 1944, making it a document of the time, rather than a piece of late-20th-century fiction. Though it remains a spectacular, unequalled piece of action film-making.
