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…

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…