Alain Resnais’ historical drama of the notorious l’affaire Stavisky is one of his most accessible movies. Producer-star Jean-Paul Belmondo was fascinated by the story of a swindler who conned half of France in the early 1930s, igniting a scandal that almost brought down the government. His Serge Stavisky projects the charisma of a grand conman,…
The movie ratings system experienced a rough beginning. Studios got the notion that America wanted R-rated product, which led to a number of mainstream movies that played like grindhouse smut. A main offender example is Roger Vadim’s unfunny soft-core murder comedy with big stars Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson. With its twisted fantasy of underaged…
Trailers From Hell Guru Allan Arkush’s The Last Reel video essay series returns! 60 years before “blockbuster” movie moguls started showing movies at home for family and friends, the Boomer generation took it much, much further. They liberated 16mm and screened it whenever & where ever they wanted! This is their story, with dinner.
This Blu-ray re-premieres a notable Joan Crawford picture that’s been all but unseeable since 1936. It’s romance and murder the way the Rich do it: Crawford’s swank socialite falls in love with the ideal mate played by Robert Montgomery, but she can’t shake a foreign lover who would rather blow up a scandal than give…
The best film of director John Flynn may be this unpretentious crime saga, a Richard Stark adaptation that makes no wrong moves across a hundred minutes of tense mob banditry. Robert Duvall is out of prison and looking to punish the syndicate. Aided by gunman Joe Don Baker and getaway driver Karen Black, he gets…
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 enjoy three big adventures on film, and a wine pairing for each. We’ll open with Peewee’s Big Adventure, from 1985, Tim Burton’s debut in the feature film category. I was…
We welcome Terry Morgan to CineSavant as a reviewer. Terry Morgan has been writing professionally since 1990 for publications such as L.A Weekly, Backstage West and Variety. He has a column reviewing horror films on Trailers from Hell called Watching the Dark. Terry’s love of horror cinema knows no bounds, though some have suggested that…
Richard Fleischer’s dystopian drama takes place in 2022, which makes it four years past its ‘sell by’ date. Is our world beginning to resemble Harry Harrison’s grim tale of overpopulation chaos? Charlton Heston essays another tough-guy Sci-fi hero, a detective who’d rather be paid in scarce grocery items than money. In his final film role,…
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…
