“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…
This 1996 documentary about Richard III was directed by Al Pacino, who had recently starred in a production of the great tragedy on Broadway. Thankfully, the film itself is no downer but rather a witty exploration of the Bard and the actors who would speak his lines. Featuring moments from the play, Pacino also interviews…
Though aimed at a family-friendly crowd, Joe Dante’s big-budget satire of big-budget blockbusters still manages to honor the subversive spirit of the original Termite Terrace pranksters (Bugs and Daffy’s trip to the Louvre is a mini-masterpiece—an exhilarating collision of high and low art). Brendan Fraser makes for an amiable Everyman (he supplied the voice for…
Author William Golding turned down numerous entreaties for movie adaptations of his provocative novel, finally accepting Peter Brook’s concept of taking 30 or so boys to a tropical island and semi-improvising a feature film. The result, surprisingly, was one of the most faithful movie versions of a novel to date.
George Axelrod’s unclassifiable satire is one of the oddest Hollywood movies, which over the years has engendered passionate support and derision. For some it’s an incisively bizarre portrait of sixties America, for others it’s a sloppily made, undisciplined mess (with more boom mikes visible in full frame than even Play It Again Sam). However, nothing…
According to Newsweek, 1984 was “The Year of the Yuppie”, referring to those ferociously materialistic young professionals whose numbers blossomed during the Reagan administration. The following year Albert Brooks made Lost In America which describes what happens when one of those shallow, upwardly mobile folks decides to ditch the Mercedes, hit the road a la…
Release was delayed for a year while Paramount mulled an offer by the liquor industry to shelve the picture. Well-deserved Oscars went to Ray Milland, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder for a movie that was only made because the studio owed Wilder a picture of his choosing. Critic James Agee bemoaned the dropping of the…
Irwin Allen’s 1960 big studio remake of the 1925 classic boasts a stellar cast and big sets, many appropriated from the previous year’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. An after-school favorite for decades, but it has more in common with One Million BC than Arthur Conan Doyle.
Ok, we’d never heard of this one either. But controversial Japanese director/artist/poet Sion Sono has quite a following on the festival circuit for themes including love, family, lust, religion and the perverse phenomenon of upskirt photography. His first cut was six hours long, but was trimmed by two hours at the request of the producers….
Most offbeat (and therefore least popular) of Don Knott’s series of Universal comedy vehicles, this one takes a more adult tone, spoofing the Playboy ethos. Audiences didn’t respond, but it plays pretty well –when you can find it. Co-star Edmond O’Brien is misidentified in this trailer.
No further evidence is needed that the 1970s were the anything-goes era of American filmmaking than this bizarre cult item that has understandably fallen through the cracks over the years. An attractive daddy’s girl satisfies her strange need to copulate with cadavers by joining a necromantic cult. Although the cultural March of Progress eventually led…
Critics moaned but audiences swooned over Arthur Hiller’s antiquated sob story, a 40’s-style tearjerker for the Me Decade. The film’s screenwriter, Erich Segal, churned out the novel as part of the movie’s marketing campaign—voilà, a best-seller in bookstores and at the box office. Though the film made stars out of Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal,…
Tony Richardson’s take on the veddy British Evelyn Waugh’s skewing of Hollywood culture and the death business wasn’t very popular with audiences in 1965, but has become one of the key films of the era. Shot largely on the grounds of LA’s Doheny Mansion, the upscale location equivalent of Bronson Canyon.
“Loveless” is the perfect title for Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2017 tragedy about a missing child and two of the worst parents in movie history. Because Zvyagintsev equates that cold-hearted couple with the Russian state he was compelled to find financing from three other countries. The finished product overcame political pushback from Moscow and snared the Jury…
The movie that began the William Castle legend is a modest affair with a terrific ad campaign that surprised everyone by becoming a sleeper hit. Do you know anyone who died of fright while watching? No, neither do we, darn it!
Peter Lorre’s Hollywood debut is one of the weirder pix ever to come from MGM, or maybe anywhere else. One of ace cinematographer Karl Freund’s rare forays into directing, and his last. Gregg Toland photographed it, and years later Pauline Kael would claim he stole a lot of shots from this to use in Citizen…
Although one wag said of director Stanley Kramer’s all-star Cinerama extravaganza, “it shows what happens when a man who doesn’t understand drama tries to do comedy”, the years have been kind to it. Nostalgia for the once-in-a-lifetime ensemble cast alone would get it by, but the extravagant stunt work that seemed so unwhimsical in 1963…
Medical doctor George Miller teamed with amateur filmmaker Byron Kennedy to make this action-packed dystopian car crash saga on a shoestring budget. Inspired by the 1973 oil crisis, its violent depiction of a bombed-out society became a top-grossing Australian commercial hit, but ran aground during limited distribution in the US. AIP, on its last legs…
Mad Max returns to his post-apocalyptic junkyard future to scavenge for food and petrol. Warner Bros. gave a big promo push to this improved, retitled sequel (Mad Max 2 in Australia) and turned it into a sizable international success. Most audiences were unaware there had been a previous Mad Max movie. By now Mel Gibson…
Director George Miller takes his adrenalized action epic The Road Warrior and injects it with an unholy supercharged mix of psychotropics and nitroglycerin. The result is Mad Max: Fury Road; no less combustible than Road Warrior but filmed with a hallucinatory fever dream zeal. In contrast to the near non-stop action sequences are sensitive, muted performances from Charlize Theron as the…
Mostly nobody saw this in its limited 1963 second feature run, but a decade later it was transformed into one of the most notorious syndicated tv titles of the era. Suffice it to say that even the author of Mein Kampf would probably find this one a pretty dire experience.