If a whiz-kid director from the three-minute-rock-video field tried his hand at a Jazz Age gangster musical, the result might be THE COTTON CLUB. Francis Coppola, who co-wrote and directed it, seemed to have skimmed the top off every twenties-thirties picture he has seen, added seltzer, stirred it up with a swizzlestick, and called it a movie. The shots don’t look as if he were framing for the movie camera; they’re framed for video excitement. His only goal seems to…

“Tell me she couldn’t play Charlton Heston’s daughter!” the projectionist muttered in my ear as Kelly McGillis pulled her lips back from her teeth in MADE IN HEAVEN and smiled. It’s a slow smile, because granite doesn't move easy. As a pure soul born in Heaven–the sort of lyrical, ethereal girl that Jennifer Jones used to play–she’s flagrantly miscast. The idea is that the characters she and Timothy Hutton play have a love literally made in Heaven: he ahs died…

For seven decades of romantic screwball comedies, sexy, smart, funny women have been waking up heroes who, through fear or shyness or a stuffy educational background, were denying their deepest impulses. The women perform a rescue mission. Sometimes, in earlier eras, they did it in the guise of dumb blondes (like Marie Wilson) or dizzy dames (like Katharine Hepburn in BRINGING UP BABY), but mostly they were wisecracking broads, like Mae West and Joan Blondell, and Jean Harlow in RED…

STOP MAKING SENSE makes wonderful sense. A concert film by the New York new-wave rock band Talking Heads, it was shot during three performances at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in December, 1983, and the footage has been put together without interviews and with very few cutaways. The director, Jonathan Demme, offers us a continuous rock experience that keeps building, becoming ever more intense and euphoric. This has not been a year when American movies overflowed with happiness; there was some…