Jan-Michael Vincent learns how to be a hit man from – who better? – Charles Bronson! Before they teamed on the mega-hit Death Wish, Bronson and director Michael Winner combined to pummel this well-regarded thriller into one of the key action films of the ’70s. The dialog-free opening 15 minutes plays like pure cinema.

Combining electrifying cinema-verite documentary footage shot during actual events (including the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago) with a more conventional story featuring actors, director-cameraman Haskell Wexler tried to illuminate the splintering of the American psyche at the height of the war in Vietnam. The resultant film, incongruously distributed by Gulf +…

From Peter Jackson’s misspent youth comes this wild and wooly musical satire featuring a cast of misanthropic puppets. With its bizarrely designed characters and plot turns involving porn actors and drug addicts, this 1989 New Zealand release is like a nightmare version of one of Disney’s Silly Symphonies. The writers include Jackson himself and future…

“Have you ever been kissed by a woman like this?” There are no words to describe this one, but Joe comes up with a few anyway.

Tony Gilroy’s 2007 movie about a lawyer who finds himself hemmed in by corruption is a deep-dive into one man’s moral quandaries but it never forgets to ratchet up the suspense when necessary. Gilroy’s script is reminiscent of Chinatown in its complexity and character development. The actors, including George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and an Oscar-winning…

Warren Beatty is one movie star who constantly took chances on offbeat projects, and his first collaboration with Arthur Penn is perhaps the oddest. Dismissed for years as an impenetrable misfire, this intriguing Kafka-esque nightmare about a stand-up comic on the run (from himself?) is finally beginning to be appreciated as the cinematic jazz spiritual…

Ross Hunter, Hollywood’s glossiest producer and Doris Day, Hollywood’s perennially cheery star, team up for this soap-operatic mix of Gaslight and Sorry, Wrong Number. Day is being stalked by a faceless killer and she finds little solace from her friends and family who assume she’s headed for a nervous breakdown. The dog-eared plot isn’t helped by the upscale…

An unlikely pairing of Shakespeare and Warner Bros. with an all-star cast and dazzling production values. You’ll notice that nowhere in this trailer do you hear a single word of that high-falutin’ Bardspeak! Coming soon from Warner Archive, a spectacular new Blu ray release of Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s 1935 classic.

A fan favorite from 50 years of tv broadcasts, this family-oriented amalgam of Kong and Son of Kong is a girl-and-her-giant-ape saga with a cheery, breezy tone. Terrific fx work by Willis O’Brien and devoted fan/assistant Ray Harryhausen gives Joe Young a more complex personality than most of his stop-motion predecessors.

Quintessential seventies cheese from the Shaw Bros. Hong Kong factory. In the Himalayas the Yeti-like giant ape Utan protects a sexy blonde jungle girl from fortune hunters and poachers. It took a Quentin Tarantino-backed 1999 reissue to revive interest in this wacked-out, so-bad-it’s-good King Kong ripoff, which hardly set the box office ablaze in its…

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…