Prime Golan-Globus product from 1984 boasting the quintessential Cannon Films plotline: a curvy aerobics teacher (played by Lucinda Dickey, star of Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo) is possessed by the spirit of an evil ninja and the only way she can can rid herself of this meddlesome ghost is to engage in foot to nose combat…
Socially committed filmmaker Cornel Wilde (who often specialized in directing showcases for his wife, Jean Wallace) depicts a future societal breakdown brought on by global famine and pollution. In today’s genetically engineered Frankenfood society it’s only a matter of time before someone pounces on this one for a remake, as it features all the sensational…
Javier Bardem enters the pantheon of formidable movie monsters as the implacable killing machine on the prowl for his $2 million. Not since Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter has an actor made evil so unsettling. Widely acclaimed as one of the most accomplished films of its era; nonethless, some audiences found it impenetrable….
Martin Scorsese leaves no stone unrolled in his 2005 documentary about the life and times of Bob Dylan. The director worked with a treasure trove of rare interviews and archival footage assembled by Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen—it’s a 3 1/2 hour musical journey that shapes up as one of the most thorough portraits of the…
Ann Sheridan specialized in tough but good-hearted cookies—in Vincent Sherman’s 1947 thriller that good heart is sorely tested. Sheridan plays Nora Prentiss, a nightclub singer who falls into an uneasy affair with a surgeon played by Kent Smith. Things go off the rails when the volatile doctor fakes his death and takes Nora along for…
The full title of Joesph Cedar’s 2016 film tells the story; Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. On the marquees it was known simply as “Norman” and it stars Richard Gere as a fellow who survives doing favors for too-powerful people who don’t want to get their hands dirty….
Laugh-In director George Schlatter based this 1976 farce on a failed stage play about two stereotypically Jewish parents and their frazzled reactions to the fact that their son has a boyfriend. For the film Schlatter cast Redd Foxx and Pearl Bailey as the parents, thereby ensuring a comedy even more rife with politically-incorrect possibilities. Look…
Perhaps the least seen of the Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing vehicles, this was intended to inaugurate a series of classy suspense-horror films from Lee’s newly-formed Charlemagne Productions, but its critical and commercial fizzle put an end to the company’s plans. The concept had potential, but it just doesn’t come together.
One of Hitchcock’s greatest crowd-pleasers, there’s something for everyone including torrid love scenes, white-knuckle suspense and Nazis. It features one of the most compelling romantic triangles on film: Cary Grant as a government agent who falls for Ingrid Bergman, the woman coerced into carrying out his perilous plan, and Claude Rains in a memorably menacing…
Lindsay Anderson’s monumentally ambitious musical pastiche plays like a mammoth music video. Themes from Anderson’s previous film, if.. abound in David Sherwin’s audacious screenplay, and the rock soundtrack is tops. There are a number of different versions of this film, none of which the director was ever really satisfied with.
With a fair number of grimly sardonic dramas like The Third Man and Odd Man Out on his resume, Carol Reed might have been seen as an odd choice to direct a big budget musical version of Dickens’ Oliver Twist. But Reed managed to balance the bright show tunes with the dark side of Dickens’…
Generally dismissed in its time because of poor reaction to commercial pitchman George Lazenby’s only turn as James Bond, Peter Hunt’s spectacular and unexpectedly dramatic take (thanks in large part to Diana Rigg’s performance) on the 1963 Ian Fleming novel has aged like fine wine and is now considered one of the major entries in…
Elia Kazan’s multi Oscar winner was based on actual characters and events surrounding then-rampant extortion, racketeering and corruption on the docks of New York. Movie history would have played out differently had producer Sam Spiegel cast his original choice Frank Sinatra instead of Marlon Brando, whose electrifying performance revolutionized screen acting overnight. Despite this, Brando…
Quentin Tarantino’s lavish reimagining of the events surrounding Sharon Tate’s murder lends a fairy tale glow to a real-life tragedy. Brad Pitt gives a career-best performance as a stuntman reduced to glorified gofer for the often-pickled and soon-to-be has-been actor played to a T by Leonardo DiCaprio. Due to Barbara Ling’s phenomenal production design, 1969’s…
Several years after her remarkable performance as the star-crossed Adele Hugo in Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H., Isabelle Adjani essayed yet another young woman gripped by obsession in 1983’s One Deadly Summer. The story, about an unstable femme fatale’s revenge against her mother’s attackers has a definite exploitation bent but the presence of Adjani and the…
Three low lifes off a bunch of people in LA to score cocaine. Although originally released straight to video, critical acclaim resulted in Roger Corman protege Carl Franklin’s noirish thriller being given a brief theatrical release.
Dale Wasserman’s powerful play set in a mental institution was a Broadway hit with Kirk Douglas, but after many years of false starts finally ended up as a Milos Forman movie produced by Kirk’s son Michael, and starring Jack Nicholson in one of his most memorable performances.
Francis Coppola’s idealistic attempt to transform the way movies were made upended his career when it crashed and burned, taking his Zoetrope studio with it. Set in Las Vegas but filmed entirely on sound stages to heighten the artificiality, it featured a number of audacious stylistic touches, but despite them (or perhaps because of them),…
This is the way it wasn’t! A longtime favorite with Creationists, this loose remake of the 1940 cavemen-vs.dinosaurs epic made a star of unknown Raquel Welch despite the fact she has almost no dialog. Its success, which led to several further prehistoric adventures from Hammer, was eclipsed by the phenomenal reaction to a single iconic…
Like its predecessor, 1968’s Salt and Pepper, One More Time is an English comedy starring two Yankees, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford. This 1970 sequel added another American to the mix with Jerry Lewis in the director’s chair. Though Lewis is an ill fit for the kind of understated British comedy favored by screenwriter…
James Cagney plays a Coca Cola executive in this wild Cold War comedy satirizing sex, politics and soft drinks. The movie began filming in Berlin but Wilder was forced to move to Munich when the Wall began construction. Famous for being so fast-paced it leaves an audience either elated or confused, the movie split critics…
Onibaba, translated loosely as “Demon Hag,” stars Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura as a cold-blooded duo who murder unsuspecting soldiers in the high grass and sell their armor to the highest bidder. Set in 14th century Japan, Kaneto Shindō’s skin-crawling horror film has a shockingly contemporary feel thanks to its merciless world-view and unnerving psycho-sexual…
Calling Baranca! Calling Baranca! Cary Grant followed up his successful role in Gunga Din with another signature performance, his edgiest to date, in one of the finest entries in the magical movie year of 1939. It was the second of five films he would make with director Howard Hawks. Famous as the supposed origin of…
Today’s commentator, the late, great Michael Schlesinger, loved screwball comedies like 1957’s Operation Mad Ball, a splendid military farce from director Richard Quine and writer Blake Edwards (on the cusp of his own directorial career). Jack Lemmon and Mickey Rooney play fast and loose as slightly larcenous enlisted men determined to celebrate their imminent release…
Archie Mayo’s 1942 film is a tuneful soap opera sustained by a treasure trove of swing era classics courtesy of Glenn Miller and his orchestra. Miller plays a bandleader who finds himself embroiled in a musical hornet’s nest of horny husbands and jealous wives. Ann Rutherford and George Montgomery star as an embattled bride and…
Director Carol Reed filmed his extremely well-cast adaptation of Grahame Greene’s spy novel on location in Havana only three months after Fidel Castro’s January 1959 revolution, and completed it just before Cuba aligned itself with the Soviet Union. Alberto Cavalcanti had explored the idea of directing this in the late ’40s (but set in Estonia)…