The Japanese New Wave strikes — in a challenging, entertaining art picture where all the perversity is in the characters’ heads. Shôhei Imamura’s unflinching view of low-level vice is a full menu of bad behavior — personal, social, legal — that makes us wonder if the problem is consumer society or human nature itself. The…
Whoa … Red Flag Down. We’re so spoiled by improved transfers of Public Domain titles that we forget that poor quality PD releases are still with us. This Sci-fi thriller was never a winner and can’t claim a positive reputation, but that doesn’t stop us completists from wanting to take a look … The cast…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week, we go digging in the dirt, with three films featuring some of the less pleasant members of society. With wine, pairings, of course. In 1986 Stuart Gordon gave us From…
After decades of neglect, George Pal’s history-making Sci-fi breakthrough arrives in a worthy video transfer. The milestone production is as original as Kubrick’s 2001 and arguably more influential, as it spurred the public to believe that space travel was a practical possibility. Filmed in Technicolor, Pal’s moonscapes captured the world’s imagination, and his silver-winged craft…
One of the best combat films of World War II is this MGM ode to the 1942 Dolittle Raid, the strike at the mainland of Japan conducted as a needed morale booster in the early months of hostilities. Some Hollywood films were an outlet for public outrage against the enemy; Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay records honest…
Nighttime dramas are the backbone of series TV. Whether they are streamed, binged, cabled or in a box set, they are our default mode when viewed from the couch. This Last Reel takes us from TV’s live “Golden Age” to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Fugitive, Naked City and features Route 66. My theory is that…
Here’s a rather good picture that’s a tough sell. We especially admire its comic tightrope act … there’s no humor in the Holocaust, but there always is in human nature. It’s a potentially grim story positioned as comedy, or an odd kind of anti-comedy. David Hayman is a cranky old concentration camp survivor living in…
Sans mobile apparent. Star Jean-Louis Trintignant and composer Ennio Morricone dominate this cheerfully attractive serial killer tale, shot in sunny Nice. A mad sniper is nailing Frenchmen right and left, and Inspector Trintignant is fresh out of clues. Philippe Labro directs from a book by Ed McBain, with Dominique Sanda, Carla Gravina, Laura Antonelli and…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week, a trio of films dabbling in dragons, to one extent or another. We also have some fire-breathing wine pairings for each. Dragons Forever is a 1988 action/comedy martial arts movie…
