R. Lee Ermey acted in three of my films and was a good friend. Sad to lose him so young. He was so strong, energetic, resolute, in command, I thought he would live forever. He worked hard to build a career after his riveting performance in Full Metal Jacket. As an untrained actor, he could…
An old west spin on To Kill A Mockingbird, John Ford’s 1960 horse opera broke new ground as the first “mainstream” western to star a black actor. Set in the early 1880s, Woody Strode plays an African-American soldier on trial for the rape and murder of a white girl. Jeffrey Hunter is his embattled commander…
Director Bill Persky’s 1980 satire benefits from the kind of quirky casting and jaundiced worldview that served Robert Altman so well in the 70’s. A sexual roundelay set in monied Marin County, the film finds such odd couples as Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld navigating new-age cults while working overtime on their disintegrating marriage.
John Waters plays nice but not too nice in this bent scenario about a suburban mom who’s really a serial killer. Starring Kathleen Turner, it’s Mommie Dearest taken to the next level and Waters positively revels in outlandish social satire; he’s like Tex Avery directing a Preston Sturges screenplay (during her trial Turner’s daughter sells…
Considering the iconic status of the finished product, it’s hard to believe that Lumet replaced director John Avildsen just before filming commenced. His detail-oriented approach yielded a cop classic. Al Pacino, in one of his most memorable performances, plays real life NYPD detective Frank Serpico, who uncovered widespread police corruption and suffered the consequences.
Sexual politics get the once-over as a family of Oregon mountain men decide to take ’em some wives. Stanley Donen’s slapstick backwoods musical is famed for its knockout choreography by Michael Kidd and proved immensely popular worldwide, leading to no less than five different stage shows (1979-2007), a tv series and even a 1982 Bollywood…
As Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas tighten the screws in a life and death face-off between a traitorous general and his whistle-blowing aide, John Frankenheimer keeps upping the ante in this brilliantly directed political thriller scripted by Rod Serling in 1964. Good-guy politicos Fredric March and Edmond O’Brien push back against the gathering storm while…
BTS details the troubled production of one of Kurosawa’s greatest achievements, a mythic and primal epic of feudal Japan that became a virtual template for latter-day action films, influencing western filmmakers for decades. Kurosawa professed himself disappointed with the popular 1960 Americanized remake The Magnificent Seven, which spawned numerous sequels and ripoffs. Screenwriter John Sayles…
Like most epics, Seven Samurai has a simple plot: beleaguered farmers hire a makeshift army of samurai to defend their crops from bandits. The no-nonsense Takashi Shimura holds down the fort alongside Toshiro Mifune as a hot-headed but loyal mischief-maker. Akira Kurosawa’s definitive masterpiece is rife with extraordinary action scenes and moments of serene beauty, embodied…
The psychotronic title is perhaps exploitation virtuoso Albert Zugsmith’s greatest gift to cinema. But ultimately, no film could live up to the forbidden delights promised although this one certainly tries. Anticipating Zugsmith’s gradual descent into total sleaze, this bizarre clunker features a ramshackle robot named “Thinko” (voiced by Al himself) who draws extra duty in…
Jonathan Glazer’s pitch-black comedy, a parody of kinky, hard-bitten British gangster films in the vein of Performance and Get Carter, stormed the box office in 2000. Ben Kingsley’s spittle-flecked performance as the bloodthirsty sociopath Don Logan was based, in Kingsley’s own words, on his grandmother, who he described as a “vile and extremely unpleasant woman”.
Vaudeville lives again in this notoriously square concoction from music producer Robert Stigwood, using most of the Beatles songs from the albums Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road. Generally considered one of the all-time turkeys of the 1970s.
The (admittedly cultish) reputation of this 1937 comic-mystery rests on one truly startling scene. And that scene is… Ah, forget it, just watch the movie, it’s only 54 minutes long and well worth the wait. Hugh Herbert and Allan Jenkins star as two bumbling detectives facing off against a killer octopus inside a deserted lighthouse….
Gordon Parks and Ernest Tidyman transformed the action film with this charismatic, Chandleresque Brooklyn private eye played by Richard Roundtree, the spiritual father to Foxy Brown, Cotton, The Hammer and many others. One of the first and slickest of the “blaxploitation” films, it was followed by two sequels, a TV series, a recent remake/spin-off starring…
Contrary to the mythology, Samuel L. Jackson is indeed the “Son of Shaft”, not his nephew, which works out just fine for this 2019 follow-up to the 2000 sequel of the original 1971 smash hit about an irascible “black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks.” Speaking of irascible, Jackson fits the…
Director Hal Ashby’s satire about a West Hollywood roué in the midst of an existential crisis is set against the backdrop of Nixon’s election in 1968 but was released in ’74 at the end of the Watergate scandal – an irony that did not escape the ticket buyers who made the film a huge box office success (the movie cost…
Dan Perri wrote and directed this 2015 morality play about a tailor who falls in with the mob and has trouble falling out. The movie had its origins in a short film with some of the same characters and featured photography by Conrad Hall and a score from Angelo Badalamenti.
Castaways on a tropical island run by Nazi fugitives who turn native girls into monsters! If that sounds appealing to you, then this threadbare 1958 drive-in cheapie is up your alley!
When this commentary first appeared on our site, it was our 700th to be posted. And who better to mark the occasion than industry legend Roger Corman, without whom numerous contributors to this site might be selling insurance for a living. Shot in 1956 but unreleased until 1958, this Hawaii-set quickie inspired some of Al Kallis’s…
Jeannie Berlin stars as Sheila, a misfit from Pennsylvania who finds New York’s dating scene no less daunting. Roy Scheider, on the cusp of superstardom in that year’s Jaws, plays a callous Romeo who plays the field but falls hard for Sheila. Though critics were mixed about Sidney Furie’s 1975 dramedy, the praise was unanimous…
The band responsible for Martin Scorsese’s favorite needle drops was filmed by the great director during their 2006 “Bigger Bang Tour” and the result is as expected, an adrenalized mix of silky smooth camera moves and immaculately recorded classics from “the greatest rock n’ roll band in the world”. The movie was released in IMAX…
Filmed over 16 days, Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby is an Altmanesque comedy with a wry twist. Rachel Sennott plays Danielle, a claustrophobic college girl whose neuroses are triggered in a big way at a very crowded shiva she attends with her parents. The film’s frantic attitude matches Danielle’s as the shiva turns into an unexpectedly…
1963 America is a madhouse. Sam Fuller’s lurid tabloid classic plays like a brilliantly subversive combination of Krafft-Ebing and The National Enquirer. Ingeniously designed on a shoestring by Eugene Lourie and starkly shot by the great Stanley Cortez. One of the best B pictures ever, whose profundity lies in its answer to the existential question,…
Blood-spattered amalgam of two different samurai entries in the 6-part “Lone Wolf/Baby Cart” series, cobbled together with an ’80s techno-music score by American producers for the drive-in trade. Voice dubbers include Sandra Bernhardt and Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders. Has a remarkably avid following considering the superiority of the originals.
The title sounds like a typically nihilistic Italian spaghetti western but it’s really a typically nihilistic Italian crime thriller. Directed by Fernando Di Leo, the action revolves around a cop who is happy dabbling in bribery until the bodies begin to pile up. A box office hit in its homeland, the movie benefits from some…
Alan Parker’s emotionally charged portrait of a collapsing marriage showcases the late Diane Keaton and Albert Finney in two of the finest performances of their careers. Too realistic and downbeat to be a wide success in its day, it endures as an uncompromising depiction of human frailty. Gifted child actress Dana Hill passed away prematurely…