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…

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is a blast from start to finish with the pairing of Paul Reubens and director Tim Burton a match made in Toys ‘R’ Us. Reubens wrote the screenplay with Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol. Danny Elfman channels Raymond Scott’s percolating rhythms and Victor J. Kemper (Dog Day Afternoon) provided the cotton-candy cinematography.

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.

Another great Cary Grant performance was overshadowed somewhat by the Oscar win of co-star James Stewart, which was widely viewed as a consolation prize for his losing the award for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Grant and Katharine Hepburn had previously teamed in author Philip Barry and director George Cukor’s earlier Holiday, a sort of…

FBI director J Edgar Hoover personally told director Sam Fuller how much he hated his films, especially this one, in which pickpocket Richard Widmark exhibits no particular patriotism while dealing with vicious Communist spies. Nevertheless his brutal noir classic has survived to become one of the director’s most revered films. Fox contractee Thelma Ritter was…

Red herrings abound in this infamous video nasty helmed by Spanish director J. Piquer Simon and starring Christopher George, Lynda Day and star-crossed fugitive from Hollywood, Edmund Purdom. The Tales from the Crypt-like story involves a psychotic killer reconstructing his mother’s body with the spare parts of his victims.

Timothy Spall stars in a fascinating character study about a compassionate executioner. Based on the true story of Albert Pierrepoint who presided over 400 hangings in England between 1932 and 1956 (including the Nazis tried at Nuremberg), Pierrepoint was considered England’s most prolific hangman as well as its most humane (taking care to finish the…

John Dexter directed this story about at a disaffected young cabbie, an older but no wiser incarnation of The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock. Singer-actor Jordon Christopher plays Jonathan, the misanthrope who bullies his fares and any pigeons that get under foot. Jill O’Hara plays his sometime girlfriend and the terrific supporting cast includes William Redfield and…

This forgotten grindhouse concoction pits a flamboyantly gay biker gang against the straights. Further proof, as if any was needed, that the world of ’70s cinema was light-years from our own. Priscilla Queen of the Desert it’s not!

A movie likely to provoke as much controversy (and occasional retching) today as it did in 1972, Pink Flamingos is, in its own way, a seminal independent film; made in a Baltimore suburb for $10,000 by a 26 year-old John Waters and starring a home grown band of outsiders (featuring the alarming 370 lb. drag…

Director Alan Parker turns Pink Floyd’s The Wall into a feature length music video in this 1992 adaptation. Boomtown Rats’ Bob Geldof plays a navel-gazing rock star “walled up” inside a motel room and Bob Hoskins pops up as his manager. Even with such a downer narrative, the film garnered positive reviews and gave E.T….

A chameleon by nature, Peter Sellers had been turning in inspired comic performances since the early fifties – but it took the role of the habitually hapless Inspector Clouseau (originally intended for Peter Ustinov) in this first of seven The Pink Panther comedies to catapult him to superstar status. Though director Blake Edwards’ screenplay placed the…

Roger Corman’s 1978 Jaws ripoff spawned remakes in 1995 (for cable) and 2010 (in 3-D) and its own “3-DD” sequel, as well as an Italian-made 1981 flying fish sequel directed by James Cameron. Although released three years after Spielberg’s blockbuster, Piranha hit the international jackpot especially in South America. Part ’50s sci-fi spoof and part underwater gore fest, this vaguely subversive Joe Dante-John Sayles collaboration…

With a great subject and a wonderful cast including Philip Seymour Hoffman and Kenneth Branagh, Richard Curtis’s 2009 comedy-drama should have a bigger following. Its release was complicated by studio cuts and a title change which, for once, seems to have helped the film find its audience. Hoffman is a rebellious DJ broadcasting from an…

Probably the best known of the AIP Corman/Poe series, circa 1961. Writer Richard Matheson had to concoct an almost entirely new story incorporating Poe’s central situation. The great Paul Frees narrates the trailer.

Jack Hill gives us the lowdown on one of his most belatedly popular movies, which took several years to make it to the drive-ins, largely because it was shot in black-and-white. Filmed under the title The Winner, it’s a gritty, no-frills drag racing saga set around the dangerous Figure Eight Races, which seem designed to…

Director David Twohy’s modestly budgeted science-fiction thriller was a surprise hit in 2000. Starring Vin Deisel as the space-age anti-hero  Richard Riddick, the film grossed over 53 million leading to a 2004 sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick. Twohy (screenwriter for 1998’s The Fugitive and TFH guru Mick Garris’ Critters 2) revisited the character three more times in…