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’…

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)…

Jack Clayton’s 1967 film is a one-of-a-kind gothic-drama about a steely band of children who keep the news of their mother’s death a secret rather than be dispersed to an orphanage. Skirting the edge of horror, the movie is more melancholy and suspenseful than scary with superb performances from Pamela Franklin and Dirk Bogarde as…

A quintessential “coming of age” film, Jim McKay’s drama is a stirring example of empathetic moviemaking. Kerry Washington, Melissa Martinez, and Anna Simpson are three African-American teens navigating a rocky road to adulthood where marching bands and motherhood share equal weight. McKay wrote the unusually perceptive screenplay.

A movie that could just as easily qualify for TFH’s Movies You Never Heard Of, Peter Hyams’ little-seen teen soaper is a sensitive look at life in a girl’s school circa 1955. Featuring TV stars Pamela Sue Martin and Parker Stevenson, the movie is an uncharacteristically modest effort from action maven Hyams and it deserves…

Although it didn’t make much of a box office dent when new, TFH guru Jonathan Kaplan’s bleak portrait of rootless suburban kids in an ’80s “model community” still packs a punch. Benefits from naturalistic and starkly credible performances from a charismatic teenage cast, several of whom went on to stardom. Co-written by TFH guru Tim…

Daniel Kremer updated Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker for this moody mystery about a radio jock investigating a murder. Photographed in sumptuous black and white by Aaron Hollander, the two hour and fifty minute movie justifies its reputation as an “existential epic neo-noir.”

An odd-man-out on director Daniel Haller’s resume, Paddy is a Ireland-set romantic comedy starring the great Dublin-born actor Milo O’Shea. Haller, best known for his wizardly art direction on Roger Corman’s Poe films, had some financial assistance from his old boss to put the movie in motion. Co-starring a cast of the Emerald Isle’s best…

Movie musicals don’t come with a more problematic pedigree than director Josh Logan’s PAINT YOUR WAGON. Starring two notably tone-deaf non-singers, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, and written by that exemplar of “Kitchen Sink” realism, Paddy Chayefsky, Logan’s film is a 2 1/2 hour musical made at a time when the genre was considered box-office…

Set in the world of Yakuzas and gambling dens, Masahiro Shinoda’s 1964 film features the kind of star-crossed lovers that populated great American noir movies of the forties. Ryō Ikebe plays a hitman who enters into a fraught relationship with a kindred soul played by Mariko Kaga. Things spiral from there. Merciless but poignant, Shinoda’s…

The original title of this influential screwball comedy was Is Marriage Necessary?, but even though writer-director Preston Sturges was on a roll, he couldn’t get that one past the Hays Office. This was Joel McCrea’s second Sturges lead after the fabulous Sullivan’s Travels and the seventh of ten Sturges-written movies in which William Demarest appeared….

Before Contagion, before Outbreak, there was this scarifying 50s germfest. Shot semi-documentary style on evocative New Orleans locations, Elia Kazan’s sixth feature outing incorporates film noir elements into its story of US Public Health officials trying to prevent a plague from spreading through the populace via some infected criminals. Film debuts of Jack Palance and…