Rushes

TABLE FOR FIVE

It is only March, but already there is a leading candidate for 1983's Six Weeks award: a brass teardrop given to the most maudlin picture of the year. But then, Table for Five perhaps has an unfair advantage. It was written by David Seltzer, who did the script for Six Weeks, and it stars Jon Voight, who loves to cry and apparently wants everyone else to join him in a grand boohoo. He plays a divorced father who takes his three children, after years of neglecting them, on a Mediterranean cruise and, en route, learns that his ex-wife has been killed in a car crash. Director Robert Lieberman overlooks no cliche and lets no banality pass him by. For collectors of awkward moments, treasures abound; but the best such moment takes place beneath the Pyramids. Nothing is permanent, Voight tells his children, and some day even these mighty monuments will be mere sand. And, by the way, there's some bad news about Mommy ...

THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE

The nice thing about movie military academies is that nothing ever changes in them. At good old C.M.I. (Carolina Military Institute), the seniors still torment the plebes (here known as "knobs"), and one among them must betray his upper-classmates and violate the honor code in order to restore civility among the young gentlemen. So creaky is this convention that there is no attempt to make this story contemporary; it is set in 1964. Some novelties have been added: the rottenest hazers are a secret society leagued with the customarily bonkers commandant; their chief victim is the only black cadet in the corps. Otherwise it is business as usual. The Lords of Discipline is a stiff, improbable movie, full of characters everyone has seen marching in this parade before.

LET'S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER

At 39, Mick Jagger is like an aging but still energetic courtesan: he gives pleasure so expertly it hardly matters that his heart and guts may not be in his work. Hal Ashby's slapdash film record of the Rolling Stones' 1981 U.S. tour reveals the old showman parading his tricks with skill and snazz. Against a pointillist backdrop of thousands of shirts and faces, Jagger skip-sprints across the huge stage, towels off his crotch with his jacket, executes arabesques and aerobics, drapes himself in chiffon or Stars and Stripes or next to nothing. He sings too, though in the atrociously mixed 24-track audio, Jagger sounds as if he were shouting through a ski mask. The rest of the band sounds tired. But the Stones' geriatric groupies and their children, who made this tour a $35 million to $40 million bonanza, hold to their act of faith in the sustaining danger of oldtime rock 'n' roll. How does the song go? You can't always get what you want,/ But if you try some time/ You just might find/ You get what you believe. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.