The people in Fred Schepsi's The Devil's Playground are like sculptured figures that glow with their own light. You're not aware of surfaces, of skin. You're aware of the substance of the flesh. The Marist Brothers at the Catholic seminary around which most of the film is set seem to be looking into themselves, puzzled and deeply disappointed by their own physicality. And the pubescent boys gaze with thunderstruck eyes at the eruptions of their bodies. The movie is always…

Roger Donaldson's Smash Palace is an amazingly accomplished movie to have come out of New Zealand. It's only Donaldson's second feature, and his first, the '77 Sleeping Dogs, which opened here a few months ago, was also the first movie to be produced in New Zealand in fifteen years. Smash Palace (a wonderfully apt title) is a variant of the "separating" movies that have recently been made in this country, but with a more basic male-female conflict. Al Shaw (Bruno Lawrence) is…

If a moviemaker is a Freudian, his most "personal" films are likely to be forever looking back. They'll center on the protagonist's past—his childhood. And no matter whose childhood is pawed over, Freudian pawing tends to be of limited interest on the screen, because, of course, we know pretty much what will be exhumed. In the Spanish writer-director Carlos Saura's Dulces Horas, or Sweet Hours, the past is a riddle to Juan (Iñaki Aierra), the playwright hero. It's melancholy in…

Slender-faced Margot Kidder has a witty curl to her lips, and she clearly took delight in the role of the deranged siren in De Palma's '73 Sisters. But she can be an irritant on-screen. There's an obstinacy about her: often she doesn't seem to yield to the roles she's playing. When she's in a "Boo!" picture like Amityville Horror, her holding back may make her seem the only smart person in the cast. But when a performer walks through movies…