A celebrity sociopath fools all of the people some of the time on his way to political office. Sound familiar? Elia Kazan’s lacerating portrait of a down home demagogue has never lost its disturbing relevance. Anchored by a ferocious performance by Andy Griffith, Budd Schulberg’s media-savvy satire, based on his story “The Arkansas Traveler”, has…
Dashiell Hammet? Akira Kurosawa? Are these among the progenitors of the spaghetti western?! Yep. Hammet’s Red Harvest informed Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which was transformed into the first Sergio Leone Dollars blockbuster that took the world by storm (although it was not the first example of the form). Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name was treated by…
Described as “The first Iranian vampire Western,” A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is an audacious take on supernatural lore that makes most genre films seem lazy. Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, the story is about a young man addicted to heroin and a young woman addicted to blood. The setting is Iran but…
More concerned with “what is it” than “who done it”, Hercule Poirot takes a break from flesh and blood villains to hobnob with the supernatural variety in Kenneth Branagh’s adaption of Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel, Hallowe’en Party. This is Branagh’s third go-round as the snippy Belgian detective and as usual, he’s surrounded by a great…
Walter Matthau plays a broke playboy and Elaine May the rich (and single) heiress who might be the key to his money problems. Director/writer May based this mildly black comedy on a short story by Jack Ritchie and peopled it with some of the funniest people on Broadway including Jack Weston and James Coco. The…
Wes Craven started a wildly popular franchise with this offbeat chiller which pretty much became a license to print money. It made back its $1.8 million budget in the first week and influenced the horror genre for decades. Robert Englund’s child-killer Freddy Krueger, named after a school bully in Craven’s past, went on to slash…
The second sequel to Wes Craven’s smash hit was the wildest. The kids who helped dispatch the supernatural psychopath Freddy Kruger in the first two chapters are now holed up in an asylum where a doctor trains them to “use” their dreams to defeat the seemingly unstoppable boogie-man. Once again a memorable assortment of up-and-coming…
A mordant Swedish comedy featuring two traveling salesmen who deal in novelty items like x-ray specs and monster masks. The movie is unique in both its concept and execution – inspired by a painting by Bruegel, the film is presented as a series of barely connected set pieces. Directed by Roy Andersson, the 2014 release…
In this specially filmed trailer producer David Suskind explains why it’s okay for white folks to like his expanded filmization of Lorraine Hansberry’s acclaimed one-set play about the struggles of a modern black family. In 1989 Bill Duke himself helmed an acclaimed TV remake (featuring character actor John Fiedler in the same role he played…
Director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant brought this adaptation of E. M. Forster’s novel to the screen to wide acclaim. Released in 1986, it’s another example of the Merchant/Ivory brand; a literate mix of scrupulous screenwriting and finely-tuned production design carried by astute and intelligent actors. Seemingly destined for the arthouse, the film was…
A crowd-pleasing film with art house appeal can mean a bonanza at the box office—a formula that made James Ivory’s film one of the surprise hits of 1985. Based on E. M. Forster’s 1908 romance, the movie is equally memorable for the new careers it launched including those of Daniel Day-Lewis and an 18-year-old Helena…
Henry Jaglom’s 1971 film is a bit of magic realism that performed a vanishing act at the box office. It remains a fascinating curio, bringing together old school genius/magician Orson Welles with an emerging Hollywood vanguard embodied by Jack Nicholson. Tuesday Weld stars as a lonely dreamer with a tenuous relationship to reality while Gwen…
This sequel to 1963’s The Pink Panther is a smaller-scaled affair and all the better for it as director Blake Edwards is able to focus his attention on that great Parisian bumbler, the cosmically inept Inspector Jacques Clouseau – played to slapstick perfection by Peter Sellers. Based on a stage play (that did not include…
The king and queen of Italian cinema, Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren, star in this story of a sexy older woman’s affair with a middle-aged gay man—it sounds like one of the duo’s naughty farces from the early ’60s but Ettore Scola’s film is a tragedy set during Mussolini’s regime. Produced by Loren’s husband Carlo…
Fred Coe directed the 1962 stage version of Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns and brought it to the big screen in 1965 with its original star, Jason Robards. A deft blend of comedy and drama, Robards is a non-conformist TV scribe charged with raising his equally quirky nephew played by Barry Gordon. Martin Balsam won…
After Young Frankenstein, this is probably the best-loved horror comedy of all time and is more elaborately produced than the previous two serious Frankenstein films. Bela Lugosi’s final turn as Dracula, and his last major studio picture. Great music score by Frank Skinner turned up in numerous subsequent A&C monster rallies.
Bud and Lou meet their last monster in this well-worn but still amusing‚ finale to their long stint at Universal. The frequently‚ at-odds duo were to break up for good a year later after their last pairing, a lamentable indie project titled after a pop song, Dance with Me Henry.
Designer/director Robert Fuest and art director Brian Eatwell created a unique and popular art deco period horror film for Price which gave his career a boost with it’s Love Story parody ad campaign. Wronged by doctors, Phibes murders them in the manner of biblical plagues. Followed by a sequel, it sets the stage for one…
Director Robert Fuest’s grisly black comedy is a sumptuously produced bit of pulp hokum as well as a gruesomely satiric salute to the career of its star, Vincent Price. Our genial anti-hero plays Anton Phibes, a crazed physician seeking revenge on the doctors who (he believes) allowed his wife to die in the aftermath of…
The Yeti. Eerie. Mysterious. Does it exist? Sure does, according to this unsung Hammer classic from Nigel Kneale and Val Guest which was tossed off on double bills in America with an especially obtuse ad campaign. The question it asks is, who is the monster, it– or us? By now it appears we all know…
Director Sydney Pollack’s 1981 film is a bristling attack on muckrakers (Paul Newman said the film was, in fact, a direct assault on The New York Post). Sally Field plays the unscrupulous newswoman and Newman is the target of her overreaching (and underhanded) journalistic crusade. Newman and co-star Melinda Dillon were nominated for Academy Awards…
A gonzo post-apocalyptic black comedy from the take-no-prisoners Spanish director and comic book artist, Álex de la Iglesia. Set in an undetermined future, the movie pits “the beautiful people” against a fed up lumpenproletariat. De la Iglesia serves up his usual mix of outré violence and looney tunes comedy, an approach that recalls the modus operandi of…
Audiences in 1951 rejected Billy Wilder’s acerbic, jet-black satire, based on a real life incident, as cynical and depressing–and that it is, in spades. But today it looks positively prescient in its unrelenting portrait of a callous and sensationalistic media and a gullible, easily manipulated public. One of Wilder’s best, least appreciated movies.
Moviegoers seeking easy answers should steer clear of Fred Zinneman’s hardboiled thriller from 1948, Act of Violence. Zinneman uses the then recent horrors of World War II as the springboard for this complex morality play starring Van Heflin and Robert Ryan as two ex-POWs whose shared humanity has been corrupted by the Nazi prison camps….
Tracy and Hepburn define the word “chemistry” as husband and wife lawyers battling each each other at home and in a divorce case allegedly inspired by the amicable divorce of Raymond Massey and his wife (so amicable that the married lawyers happily divorced each other and tied the knot with their clients). Rooted in the screwball comedy tradition, Garson Kanin and Ruth…
One of the then-rare examples of a director remaking his own film, Leo McCarey’s 1957 remake of his 1939 Love Affair casts Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr as lovers for the second time, in parts originated by Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne. This all-time champion weepie gained a new fan base when it was excerpted…