An elaborate hodgepodge of fairy tale romance and mythological mumbo-jumbo, Ridley Scott’s big-budget fantasy is high-gloss kitsch, beautifully photographed by Alex Thomson and brought to life by Rob Bottin’s stunning makeup effects which are worn by the majority of the—very large—cast. Star Tom Cruise naturally foregoes any masks, leaving it to Tim Curry to steal…
Former AIP head James Nicholson formed Academy Pictures to produce his own projects and this one, of only two released after his death, validates the difference between former partner Sam Arkoff’s aesthetic and his own. Richard Matheson’s popular haunted house novel, transposed to England, receives a classy production with A-level promotion, although the sexuality is…
Dustin Hoffman has the jazzy delivery of the ill-fated comedian down to a tee and Valerie Perrine gives a touching performance as his hapless wife but the real star of Lenny might be director Bob Fosse himself. His electrified portrayals of the seedy strip joints of the fifties, filmed in luminous black and white by Bruce Surtees,…
Classical movie making of the highest order, Luchino Visconti’s sweeping 1963 epic set during the Italian revolution plants Burt Lancaster at the center of a long form feast for the senses embodied by the late Claudia Cardinale who is exquisitely photographed by the great Giuseppe Rotunno. The music is by Fellini’s longtime collaborator, Nino Rota. Surely…
Retitled Bolero for its American release in 1981, Claude Lelouch’s Les Uns et les Autres is a musical multi-family saga spanning five decades. Starring Robert Hossein and Geraldine Chaplin, Lelouch’s screenplay follows the travails and triumphs of four households of different nationalities—it’s their shared love for music that unites the characters and the film.
The hangman Albert Pierrepoint (of Pierrepoint – The Last Hangman) makes a small but important appearance in Peter Medak’s 1991 film about the controversial 1953 execution of Derek Bentley for the murder of a policeman (even though Bentley merely egged on the actual shooter with the phrase, “Let him have it.”) The film stars Christopher…
The great Nigel Green brings a delicious patina of sardonic menace to one of his few lead roles as the cheerful would-be assassin of his newly rich nephew. One of William Castle’s later efforts, it’s gimmick-less and shot pretty much like a tv show, but its uneasy mix of fun and child murder has a…
Director John Hancock’s debut feature stars the mercurial Zohra Lampert as a former mental patient terrified she’s losing her mind when she sees apparitions at a Connecticut farmhouse–or does she? It’s scary comfort food for hordes of horror fans who first encountered it on Creature Features, and enjoys a fan following larger than its so-so…
Those naughty Pythons are back and this time they’re really looking for trouble – and they got it. A bracing satire of organized religions of all shapes and sizes, supposedly faithful folks acting in bad faith protested that Cleese, Jones, Idle and the other Pythons were mocking Jesus. The wonderfully befuddled and very human Graham…
Director/writer John Sayles continued on his fiercely independent path with this critically acclaimed but audience-dividing 1999 drama starring Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as a star-crossed lounge singer and David Strathairn as a handy man with a mysterious past. Sayles uses his formidable talents as a novelist to fashion an unpredictable storyline fleshed out with memorably intriguing…
Warner Anderson, star of the long-running early fifties TV show The Lineup, repeated his role in 1958’s big screen version but the real stars of director Don Siegel’s brutal thriller were Eli Wallach and Robert Keith as a pair of sociopathic crooks and, of course, Siegel himself who masterminded several lethal set pieces including the…
A career high– and low– point for director Mario Bava, who was finally allowed to create a film entirely to his own taste with no interference from above, only to see it discarded when his original version proved too offbeat to attract a distributor. He never lived to see his cut rescued from the ash…
Was Franz Liszt the first rock star? Is the Pope an ex-Beatle? You bet! Many regard this as the movie during which director Ken Russell left this planet, never to return. It’s certainly original. A sort of deranged sequel to Tommy with enough mad imagery to raise vulgarity to something approaching high art.
A beautiful, if flawed, counterculture epic, Arthur Penn’s 1970 film has the sweep of a Dickens novel and the sardonic humor of an Altman movie (MASH was released that same year). Dustin Hoffman is Jack Crabb—a white man raised by the Cheyenne and nearly killed by Custer. Hoffman’s Everyman performance is superb but the movie’s…
Robert Redford reputedly dismisses this particular vehicle in which he plays an unsympathetic motorcycle racer, but it’s actually sort of his version of The Hustler Meets Hud. Great soundtrack includes contributions from Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Bob Dylan.
A movie of an exceedingly gentle nature, Yim Soon-rye’s Little Forest tells the story of Hye-won who abandons her dreams of the academic life and returns to the small village of her youth. Based on a popular manga by Daisuke Igarashi, Soon-rye and the ingratiating actress Kim Tae-ri touched the audiences of South Korea who…
Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer’s black comic look at dysfunctional 1970s New Yorkers was a bit too much for audiences at the time, but today it looks like a documentary. A Broadway flop, it was well received in London as a Royal Shakespeare Company production, then director Alan Arkin successfully revived it Off-Broadway, winning Feiffer…
The little picture that could. Emerging from initial mini-budget obscurity to full fledged mainstream fame, this may be Roger Corman’s best known movie, despite the fact that most of the ostensible audience has probably never seen it. Subsequent incarnations have turned this wacky cult item into an unlikely piece of Americana.
This 1976 police thriller was gore-happy director Ruggero Deodato’s only foray into the genre but he leaves his fingerprints all over this brutal tale of a special squad of undercover cops given free reign in their strong armed tactics. It was familiar territory for both leading man Marc Porel (The Sicilian Clan) and co-star Adolfo Celi,…
A low budget satire about the perils of low budget filmmaking, writer/director Tom DiCillo tells his story in three acts, two of them being actual nightmares, the third just possibly real life. Steve Buscemi plays a harried director whose imagination runs wild on the first day of shooting his new film and his cast, including…
“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” asked the ads. Well, it wasn’t easy, but Stanley Kubrick managed to pull off a brilliant take on Nabokov’s “unfilmable” novel that passed the finicky 1962 censors. For years they said, if only he’d waited a few more years for the screen to loosen up –…
Vilmos Zsigmond won the National Society of Film Critics’ award for best cinematography on this, his third pairing with director Robert Altman. Altman and Leigh Brackett, cowriter of the screenplay for The Big Sleep, turn Raymond Chandler’s LA gumshoe into a figure of ’70s angst in what many consider the director’s masterpiece and Elliott Gould’s finest hour. Bonanza…
At nearly four hours, Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary about The Grateful Dead lasts as long as one of their typical shows. The movie, which veers between live performances and studio sessions, is a deep dive in the band’s mythology but manages to intrigue even those who dislike the free-floating vibe of Jerry Garcia’s never-ending jams.
Although three directors are credited, veteran producer Darryl F. Zanuck was the true auteur behind this elaborate all-star multi-national recreation of the battle of D-Day, shot mostly on the actual locations (hundreds of live land mines had to be cleared from various beaches before filming). At the time 20th Century-Fox was overspending on Cleopatra and…
Along with Roger Corman, Robert Aldrich seems to be the director most represented on Trailers from Hell. This prison-set anti-authoritarian football movie has similarities to The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Burt Reynolds, who also appeared in the 2005 Adam Sandler (!) remake, plays a violent anti-hero who makes us root for him against…
Diane Keaton, who passed away last week, was a great actress with unexpected range: at the same moment audiences were falling in love with Annie Hall, Keaton starred in the feel-bad movie of the year, Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Leaving the sunny Annie far behind, Keaton plays an unhappy romantic who loses herself in…