Peter Bogdanovich followed the success of The Last Picture Show with this deliberately retro thirties-style portrait of a depression-era con man and the little girl he may be passing off as his daughter. Ryan O’Neal has the Adolphe Menjou part and his daughter Tatum plays the Shirley Temple role.
An ailing schoolgirl’s sketches become disturbingly real in her dreams. THF Guru Bernard Rose’s debut film is an unnerving fantasy nightmare, based on Catherine Storr’s juvenile novel “Marianne Dreams”, that deserves to be better known. Its Lewtonesque dream psychology recalls The Curse of the Cat People as well as Night of the Hunter, Invaders from…
One of the most charming movies ever made, Lewis Gilbert’s bittersweet comedy is escapist entertainment at its best. Kenneth More plays the by-the-book butler to a household of insufferable snobs—the tables are turned, and how, when the whole crew is shipwrecked on a paradisiacal island. Sally Ann Howes is the prim aristocrat turned swinging Jane…
A corporation devoted to political assassinations?! What seemed pretty far out to some critics in 1974 doesn’t look quite so crazy 40 years later. The second entry in what has been called Alan Pakula’s political paranoia trilogy (following Klute and preceding All the President’s Men) benefits from striking Gordon Willis camerawork and a sharp script…
Kermit Schafer was a man who got rich off other people’s mistakes—”bloopers” he called them—and he broke the bank with a series of best-selling comedy records featuring the most celebrated gaffes. In 1974 he rolled the dice and put together a theatrical version, Pardon My Blooper. Dick Clark came on board for the TV edition…
Martin Ritt’s film about struggling jazz musicians in Paris circa 1961 comes with quite a pedigree, including Duke Ellington’s soundtrack, Louis Armstrong in a prominent role, and evocative black and white cinematography by the great Christian Matras (Jean Renoir’s La Grand Illusion and Max Ophüls’s The Earrings of Madame De…). Not to mention two superb…
Wim Wenders’ 1984 French-German coproduction features a typically (for Wenders) unconventional cast, including the great Harry Dean Stanton as an amnesiac who enlists his brother (Dean Stockwell) in a search for Stanton’s runaway wife played by Nastassja Kinski. Wenders brings a poker-faced European sensibility to the backwaters of America with compelling results. The stellar crew…
Wim Wenders’ fatalistic road movie stars Harry Dean Stanton as an amnesiac who wanders Texas in search of his lost wife. Dean Stockwell co-stars as Stanton’s estranged brother and Nastassja Kinski is Stanton’s runaway bride. Graced with a keenly literate script by L.M. Kit Carson and Sam Shepard, the film is made complete by Ry…
After adapting The Manchurian Candidate, legendary screenwriter George Axelrod turned his attention to this “marshmallow-weight hokum” directed by Richard Quine. William Holden and Audrey Hepburn play a capricious screenwriter and his eager to please secretary in a comedy rife with in-jokes and cameos including Tony Curtis and Marlene Dietrich. The passage of time has given…
A gritty newspaper saga about two battling tabloids shot like one of Fuller’s war movies, Park Row was one from the heart. Fuller began his career as a crime reporter at the ripe old age of 17 and claimed this period drama as his favorite of his films. Ignoring his pal Darryl Zanuck’s suggestion that he make it…
Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers approach silent-movie purity in this non-stop, quintessentially ’60s gag fest set at the kind of Hollywood party that Fatty Arbuckle wishes he’d lived to see.
Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac farewell to the western genre evokes the death of the old west by relentlessly killing off its character actors. Another troubled production released in a truncated version which has been supplanted by two re-edited variants. But in any condition it’s a melancholy, beautiful movie. An exhaustive accounting of the brouhaha is chronicled in Paul Seydor’s The…
Based on an actual incident, Kubrick’s powerful anti-war classic is his first masterpiece, featuring an unforgettable ensemble of Hollywood actors at the top of their game. Bavaria stands in for WWI France and the trench warfare scenes are the most harrowing ever. With one of the great endings of all time. If you don’t tear…
Based on an actual incident, Stanley Kubrick’s scathing anti-war classic set in the mud-packed trenches of WWI is his first masterpiece, featuring an unforgettable ensemble of Hollywood actors at the top of their game. Bavaria stands in for France as Kubrick’s effortlessly mobile camera prowls the trenches as with the elan of a Max Ophuls. With…
Jerry Lewis writes, directs, produces, stars, and probably does the craft service on this showbiz comedy made toward the end of his Paramount contract. It plays today somewhat like an early version of Entourage and may well be revealing of Jerry’s view of his own place in the Hollywood firmament.
Geremy Jasper’s 2017 Sundance hit is a genial look at how a rap star is born. Danielle Macdonald plays “Patti” Dombrowski whose dreams of hip hop stardom are met with the usual travails but the actress’s star-making performance won over audiences.
George C. Scott declined the Oscar he won for his towering portrayal of General George S. Patton, warrior out of time, but the film garnered seven other Academy Awards in most of the major categories. Epic in scope, photographed in 65mm Dimension 150, and sporting another brilliant Goldsmith score, this is the war movie for…
Rip Torn stars as the volatile Maury Dann, an unscrupulous country music star whose story plays out like one of his own songs. Director Daryl Duke’s hard-boiled portrait of this All-American heel pulled no punches and garnered a lot of critical acclaim but little box office. Illustrator and songwriter Shel Silverstein contributed a few of…
The first Video Nasty came not only before video but from the esteemed Michael Powell, whose career was sidetracked into shorts for The Childrens’ Film Foundation by this much maligned and misunderstood rumination on the dark powers of cinema. In the US it was relegated to skinflick houses and grindhouse second features.
A bittersweet wish-fulfillment fantasy from director Francis Ford Coppola. Kathleen Turner stars as a melancholy housewife fast approaching middle-age who hits her head at her class reunion and wakes up in 1960 as her 17 year-old self. What might have been just another helping of ersatz Capra-corn turns into a savvy and even rueful comedy…
Despite its nightmarish production history this innovative 1968 collaboration between Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg has emerged as one of the most influential movies of its era. Years of midnight screenings have turned around the critical consensus from “worthless” (Richard Schickel) to “a sophisticated visual and aural knockout” (Glenn Erickson). Jack Nitzsche’s score was one…
An untypical project for Henry Hathaway who specialized in two-fisted action films, 1935’s Peter Ibbetson is unusual in more ways than one. Gary Cooper and Ann Harding play two steadfast lovers whose romance will not be denied; even when Cooper is imprisoned they’re able visit each other in their dreams. Almost oppressively strange, the film’s…
Don Coscarelli’s B-movie smash has some of the childs-eye fever dream atmosphere of 1953’s Invaders From Mars. The movie pins its notoriety on its central villain, “The Tall Man”, played by the imposing Angus Scrimm, an otherworldly undertaker who manufactures zombies out of the recently deceased. Made for 300,000, the movie took in 12 million…
Radioactivity is not our friend: that’s the message ’50s sci fi tykes would have taken away from this if they‚ ‘d been‚ able to stay awake. Nothing in this undernourished cheapie makes much sense, but that’s never been a drawback for this sort of thing, which is essentially a poster in search of a movie.
“From the files of the Central Bureau” comes this terminally uneventful, stock footage-laden docu-style alien invader film, one of a series of on-location sci fi cheapies from director W. Lee Wilder. Insomniacs might try double billing this with The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues for a restful night. The full movie can be seen here.
Brian De Palma and Paul Williams’ satirical glam-rock-opera takeoff on the Lon Chaney classic is the very definition of a midnight movie: bizarre, stylish and totally out there in that unique anything-goes 70s mode that looks positively classical today.