Any subtleties or ambiguous notions found in 1982’s First Blood are blown up real good in this 1985 sequel. Co-written by Stallone and James Cameron, the second film picks up right where the first left off as Rambo is released from prison in order to rescue a squadron of POWs in Vietnam. Directed by George…

Like Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa found it difficult to find backing for projects in his later years. Producer Serge Silberman came to the rescue with a Japanese-French coproduction package to enable the director to make this dark spectacle based primarily on the exploits of an actual 16th century warlord, although there are undeniable similarities to…

Rasho-mon is the name of the gate to the city of Kyoto, the medieval setting of the film that brought director Akira Kuroswa to international recognition. Despite daily battles with his unsympathetic studio backers, he produced a worldwide hit that rejuvenated Japanese cinema on the world stage, although it was less appreciated domestically. The concept…

Bruno Mattei, one of Italy’s more shameless exploitation directors, pays gory homage to Bert I. Gordon in this futuristic horror film about biker gangs and giant rats. Ottaviano Dell’Acqua is the relatively heroic gang leader and cameraman Franco Delli Colli, cousin to the great cinematographer Tonino, adds some much-needed class to the production.

Having added some comedy to his earlier Poe trilogy “Tales of Terror”, Roger Corman went all out for humor in this popular 1963 entry, which was nevertheless sold basically as a straight horror film. But the image of Peter Lorre in a bird costume was kind of a tipoff…

A rather inelegant retitling of Gary Sherman’s British thriller “Deathline”, originally pitched to the grindhouse crowd but eventually rediscovered by critics and audiences on tv and video. One of Donald Pleasance’s finest hours.

Lewis Gilbert’s 1956 film about a World War II flying ace is one of the great stiff-upper-lip docudramas. Kenneth More stars as real-life hero Douglas Bader who flew numerous missions during the Battle of Britain and survived years in a POW camp. All of this on prosthetic legs. Gilbert’s crew is ace too, including Hammer Studio’s…

Get out your 3-D glasses….then put them away, as director/writer/comic Albert Brooks personally hawks his debut feature in a special Hitchcockian trailer (with no footage from the actual movie) presented entirely in 3-D — Not. This is Brooks in his post-Saturday Night Live period, a funny warm up for his masterpiece, Modern Romance. One of…

Curiosity killed the cat and next in line might be Jeff Jeffries, a nosy shutterbug who suspects his henpecked neighbor is a cold-blooded killer. Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller is not only one of the most suspenseful films of all time, it has some cheeky things to say about the voyeuristic tendencies of its own audience. Starring…

It’s pretty much a bromide that if James Dean had not died at his peak he might have ended up like Troy Donahue, but in this emblematic Nick Ray film, released after Dean’s death in a 1955 auto accident, he continues to electrify new generations with his raw emotion.

Set in a smoggy Pennsylvania mill town, the first film from director James Foley and screenwriter Chris Columbus sounds like the plot of a Springsteen song with Aidan Quinn in the role of a misunderstood dreamer from the wrong side of the tracks romancing a poor little rich girl played by Daryl Hannah. Beautifully photographed…

Howard Hawks’ first western was a huge hit and marked what John Wayne had feared might turn out to be his swan song, at the age of 41. He later said John Ford “never respected me as an actor until I made Red River.” During the shoot Wayne came to appreciate the talents of debuting…

Director James Goldstone’s 1971 film takes its title from an ancient mariner’s rhyme, “Red sky at morning, sailor take warning” – the movie is no less compelling than that ominous rhyme, the story of a teen uprooted to a lonely town in New Mexico at the beginning of World War II. Richard Thomas plays the…

There are more twists and turns in two minutes of David Mamet’s action-packed drama than a dozen martial arts films (Chuck Norris need not apply). With an eclectic cast featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tim Allen, Ricky Jay, and Mamet favorite Joe Mantegna, the head-spinning plot mixes up insurance lawyers, magicians, crooked fight promoters, and jiu-jitsu in…

Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift both wanted to play the lead in John Huston’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’ Southern Gothic novel. But after Clift’s death Huston chose Brando to play the US army major whose obsession with serviceman Robert Forster leads to disaster. Brian Keith is especially good in support. Imagine this being made by…

Stooges and Bowery Boys director Edward Bernds brings his budget-savvy aesthetic to one of AIP’s profitable drive-in delinquency teen exploitation pics (great poster, btw). Bernds was accidentally nominated for an Oscar a year earlier, when the Academy confused his Bowery Boys vehicle High Society with the Bing Crosby-Grace Kelly musical. TFH Guru Jonathan Kaplan remade…

Director Alex Cox’s grungy sci-fi comedy has something for everybody; possessed life forms, shaggy dog humor, Harry Dean Stanton and one of the greatest punk rock soundtracks in the history of movies. Iggy Pop’s theme song kicks off the quirky plot about a layabout (Emilio Estevez) who finds his calling repossessing cars and ends up…

Roman Polanski’s first English-language film is one of his best, a a brilliant study of a young French girl’s descent into madness. Catherine Deneuve’s most iconic performance, with one of the great closing shots ever.

Darren Aronofsky’s hyperventilating portrait of drug addiction focuses on a group of Coney Island inhabitants each with their own down-spiraling horror story. Relentlessly grim, the film is shot and edited in a speedfreak frenzy with Clint Mansell’s slash and burn musical score egging on each character’s fast track to hell. Ellen Burstyn was nominated for an Oscar for…

Directed by Daniel Petrie and written by Lewis John Carlino, Resurrection is an unusually thoughtful film about the possibilities of healing sick or injured people through compassion alone. Ellen Burstyn is the Kansas housewife who has an out of body experience after a car crash that gives her extraordinary powers, Sam Shepard is the boyfriend who…

Jack Arnold is once again in the director’s chair and Ricou Browning is back in his Gill Man suit but the Creature clocks in with a new crew in tow, including John Agar as an animal psychologist and Lori Nelson as a beautiful ichthyologist and inevitable object of the creature’s affections. The film was the…

Regrettably, we haven’t paid much attention here at TFH to the flood of Euro sword-and-sandal coproductions that followed the international success of the Steve Reeves Hercules films. Brian Trenchard-Smith remedies this oversight with his analysis of one of the most typical examples of the peplum genre that clogged cinemas throughout the early 60s.

The composer George Gershwin died in 1937 and eight years later Hollywood paid tribute with this biography directed by Irving Rapper. The preponderance of musicians appearing as themselves, including Paul Whiteman and Oscar Levant, confirms the storyline will concentrate on Gershwin’s music while playing fast and loose with the details of his private life. Robert…

Richard Pryor prowls the stage of the Hollywood Paladium for 82 remarkable minutes in this 1982 “concert” film, gleefully riffing on the roller-coaster turns of his tumultuous personal life (including his cocaine addiction and self-immolation) while effortlessly embodying a multitude of characters, in particular his guilt-tripping friend Jim Brown and the grizzeled sidewalk philosopher, “Mudbone”….

Director Sam Peckinpah was furious when the studio cavalierly pulled the plug on his Colorado location shoot, forcing him to build a mining town full of fake snow in Bronson Canyon. Nevertheless he was able to regroup and the resulting movie, an elegiac valedictory‚ for western icons Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, set the tone…

James Coburn made his film debut as a  naive  gunslinger  in one  the  finest of Budd Boetticher’s  laconic series of sparsely stylish low-budget Randolph Scott Westerns, shot mostly in and around Lone Pine, California. Burt Kennedy’s  ironic script has Scott  playing another vengeful loner, this time a  bounty hunter trying to take Lee Van Cleef’s…