Although filmed in 1982, James Bridges’ film maudit did not see the light of a projector until 1984, and even then in very limited release. In the meantime the writer-director’s version of the death of a drug dealer went under the studio knife and saw its non-linear storytelling conventionalized into a standard narrative. The result…
“How like a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child.” Few of them have been more thankless than Veda (16 year old Ann Blyth), Mildred’s ungrateful daughter in Michael Curtiz’s classic adaptation of James M. Cain’s best selling novel. Cain disliked the movie but thought Crawford was perfect in the role Bette Davis turned down. It…
The Coen Bros.’ stylized hybrid of ’30s prohibition gangster sagas and ’40s noir films was the Boardwalk Empire of its day. Dashiell Hammett is once again a prime inspiration for the mayhem, which provides Albert Finney and John Turturro with memorable turns.
“Queen of Crime” Agatha Christie was not only the world’s best-selling mystery writer, but the top-selling author of all time, her sales ranking behind only Shakespeare and The Bible. Many of her works were adapted to well over a hundred movies and TV plays starting in 1928. This 1980 Miss Jane Marple mystery The Mirror…
A charmingly retro film recalling the screwball comedies of the 30’s and 40’s, director Bharat Nalluri’s movie covers 24 hours in the life of a bubble-brained singer (played by Amy Adams) and her prim and proper social secretary (played by Frances McDormand). The 2008 film, based on a property that had knocked around Hollywood since…
Although star Gregory Peck felt director John Huston should have played Ahab himself, Huston had hoped his father Walter Huston would live to take the role. This third film version of Melville’s classic is beautifully shot and produced, but Huston and writer Ray Bradbury had a rocky relationship, which Bradbury dramatized in his novel “Green…
French director Jacque Demy’s first American production (shot a year after his homage to Hollywood musicals, The Young Girls of Rochefort) stars Gary Lockwood, just coming off of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the real star of Model Shop is LA itself; the film is a veritable time capsule of the city in the late…
Albert Brooks’s 1981 comedy about the self-inflicted wounds of a self-absorbed moviemaker lacks the absurdist observations of his previous film – 1979’s Real Life – but it mines a deeper, more acerbic humor from Brooks’s roller-coaster romance with an extraordinarily patient bank executive played by Kathryn Harrold.
One of the less beloved Universal sci-fi horrors of the ’50s, this monster-laden lost civilization potboiler still has its fans. If Howard Hawks had trouble figuring out how a Pharoah talked, imagine how hard it was for writer Laszlo Gorog (Gorog spelled backwards) to approximate the speech patterns of Ancient Sumerians!
“No wire hangers, ever!” Joan Crawford once noted in an early 70s interview that among current actresses only Faye Dunaway had “what it takes” to become a true star. Faye repaid the compliment by portraying Joan in this movie based on daughter Christina Crawford’s tell-all book about the dysfunctional household she grew up in with…
A coming of age film set in late 40’s Québec, Mon Oncle Antoine tells the story of a young boy whose uncle runs the family store while performing double duty as the town’s undertaker. Claude Jutra’s film was showered with awards including annual inclusion in the Sight and Sound’s “greatest films” poll.
It’s hard to imagine today the impact this tawdry but fascinating Italian “shockumentary” had on the world in 1962, when the bizarre customs of people in other lands seemed both exotic and horrifying to Western eyes. Its smash success spawned a whole genre of mostly phony Mondo movies, each outdoing the other for pure sleaze,…
14 years after 1938’s Bringing up Baby, Cary Grant and Howard Hawks reunited for another swing at screwball comedy, this time with a monkey instead of a leopard and Ginger Rogers taking over for Katharine Hepburn. Grant is a scientist searching for the fountain of youth and unfortunately he finds it: the serum backfires in…
Is it possible? Could this be the Worst Movie Ever? Another unfinished amateur production gets the minimum attention required to make it fit for the Southern drive-in circuit. “Go Monster Go!”
A late entry in the 1950s Universal International monster gallery, this is mostly composed of leftover ideas and props from the glory days. Still, there’s a level of studio professionalism that its indie competitors could never match. Perennially affordable sci-fi leading man Arthur Franz, infected with the blood of a prehistoric fish, turns into a…
Writer/Director Claudio Fragasso helmed the legendarily loopy Troll 2 and, while lacking the sheer volume of WTF moments that enlivened that film, Monster Dog still displays the elegant touch of the creator of such rarefied fare as Rats Night of Terror and Hell of the Living Dead. Alice Cooper stars as a vacationing rocker who may or may not be the victim of a lycanthropic curse. Cinematographer José…
This much maligned and conversely beloved 1953 cheapie, one of the most bizarre and notorious “bad movies” ever, sports some surprisingly imaginative use of 3-D. Sold to TV only a few months after its theatrical release, it provided a surreal video jolt for fifties tykes with its lurid end of the world scenario. With a…
D.A. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking 16mm record of the one and only 1967 Monterey music fest is really the first concert film as we know it. The acts comprise a who’s who of the rock world during the Summer of Love.
The immortal BBC phenomenon Monty Python’s Flying Circus went memorably cinematic with their first genre spoof (following an early feature debut consisting of recycled TV sketches). Memorable moments abound, including the killer rabbit, the Knights who say Nee!, the dismemberment duel, and on and on. To many comedy buffs this is The Holy Grail.
Talk about pedigree: this controversial cult horror film was directed by Lloyd Kaufman’s brother and was remade this year by THF Guru Darren Bousman–who decodes the original and why he wanted to reimagine it. Criticized in 1980 for its misogyny and violence, writer-director Charles Kaufman claimed it was satirical, but subsequent reissues were shorn of…
John Huston’s 1952 bio-pic of tortured artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec avoids most of the “tortured-artist” cliches by surrounding star Jose Ferrer with beautiful recreations of Lautrec’s world and even more beautiful women including a (believe it or not) completely charming Zsa Zsa Gabor as the flighty but sweet can-can dancer Jane Avril. Plus a moving score…
Chinese actress Zhao Tao is at the center of a lover’s triangle spanning generations in Jia Zhangke’s romantic epic from 2015. Tao plays Fenyang, an industrious young woman who grows older, wealthier, and somewhat happier thanks to the reconciliation with her prodigal son. The film ends on an ambiguous but exuberant note powered by Pet…
The nearly bankrupt country of Grand Fenwick declares war on the United States in order to receive the financial aid that would be awarded the tiny country after their inevitable defeat. Unfortunately, they win. Peter Sellers stars (in three different roles) alongside Jean Seberg in this 1959 British cold war farce written by Roger MacDougall…
Orson Welles’ most mysterious film has him playing a sinister international tycoon who, like Charles Foster Kane, is obsessed with his past, which he can’t remember — or can he? A motley assortment of the director’s pals fill out the various roles, including then-wife Paola Mori.
Jonathan Kaplan gives us a brutally honest chronicle of his ill-fated attempt to transform spaghetti western star Terence Hill (Mario Girotti) into a Hollywood action hero. The movie is underrated, but it withered at the box office and remains pretty obscure today.
Even today, 60 years later, the money-pit jokes in this picture still resonate. Cary Grant’s attempt to build a house in the country leads to predictable disaster. Remade as The Money Pit and Are We Done Yet?, but this one’s the best.