Former editor Amy Holden Jones reveals a saga that could only have taken place in the bygone world of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and resulted in her first directorial assignment– a girls-in-jeopardy horror picture that led to a career as a successful Hollywood screenwriter. Sequels ensued. Read all about “20 Things We Learned from…
François Truffaut followed up the tragic The Story of Adele H with this sunny comedy about childhood innocence and resiliency (to show just how resilient, one baby falls out a window and merely bounces harmlessly off the bushes below). Truffaut worked with a stripped down script to allow for more improvisation from his young cast….
The bromide is that satire is what closes on Saturday night, and the box office reception to Michael Ritchie’s expose of small town beauty pageants certainly bears that out. The American Dream comes in for a drubbing, but Richie and screenwriter Jerry Belson have such affection for their characters that it’s uplifting rather than a…
Smile, Michael Ritchie’s aptly named 1975 film, takes aim at American beauty pageants and the sunnily eager contestants, their ravenous parents and long suffering chaperones. But the real reason to smile is Bruce Dern’s funny and touching performance as Big Bob Freelander, head judge of the contest and sometime used car dealer. Once again Ritchie…
Also known as Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, the third entry into the Burt Reynolds/Jackie Gleason good-old-boy car comedies has everything but Burt Reynolds. A beleaguered production from the get go, the plan was for Gleason to take over the Reynolds role in a dual role alongside his bumptious character, Sheriff Buford T. Justice. That…
Two decades after its release, society may have finally caught up with this 1992 comedy about conspiracy theorists, computer hackers and the currently topical NSA. With a uniquely quirky cast (including Ben Kingsley, Sidney Poitier and Dan Aykroyd) supporting star Robert Redford, this high tech caper film was, unsurprisingly, a box office success. The playfully…
Director Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 follow-up to his cult-fave The Host was an across-the-board critical hit but suffered from its limited release in art-house theaters. The film’s action is entirely relegated to the interior of a massive train inhabited by the last remaining survivors of earth, the result of a climate change experiment gone tragically wrong….
Robert Harling and Andrew Bergman wrote the super-smart script for this meta-comedy about the soap opera drama behind a soap opera drama. Directed by Michael Hoffman, the cast features Sally Field as a fading afternoon star and Cathy Moriarty as her unscrupulous rival – their character’s names, “Celeste Talbert” and “Montana Moorehead” are just more…
Wartime phenomena Bud and Lou at the height of their fame in one of their better-received vehicles, which happens to incorporate one of their best vaudeville reclaimations, the “Floogle Street” routine, here rechristened Bagel Street, but given short shrift in the trailer.
The box office success of From Here to Eternity, adapted from the James Jones best-seller, paved the way for this 1958 film based on the author’s follow-up novel. It’s another example of director Vincente Minnelli’s seemingly effortless mastery of the medium, here using the expansive Cinemascope lens to frame an intimate small-town tragedy (He claimed…
Under the radar comedy western from director Andrew McLaglen starring Dean Martin, Brian Keith and a surrealistic supporting cast including Honor Blackman, Ben Johnson and football star/announcer Merlin Olsen. The convoluted farce focuses on the last hurrah of bandit Joe Baker (Dino) before he settles down to married life.
This black comedy has fallen by the wayside since its release in 1970 and considering its rich pedigree, it deserves another look. Directed by Harold Prince and written by Hugh Wheeler, Angela Lansbury and Michael York play two social climbers ready to marry or murder anyone to get what they want. John Simon hated the film,…
Something Wild, Jonathan Demme’s screwball thriller from 1986, makes good on its title and then some. Jeff Daniels plays a mild-mannered IRS agent caught in the orbit of a flaky small time thief played by Melanie Griffith. The film proceeds as a funny, quirky rom-com á la Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby until the arrival of Griffith’s sociopathic ex-husband, played…
This adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel was Paul Newman’s second directorial effort. Newman stars with Henry Fonda and Lee Remick as The Stampers, an Oregon logging family embroiled in a bitter struggle with the local union and other loggers. John Gay wrote the screenplay and longtime character actor Richard Jaeckel earned an Oscar nomination for…
The most underrated of the wartime Universal horror films is steeped in atmosphere and situations that anticipate later vampire pictures. Lon Chaney is Count Alucard (the first time that now-wheezy moniker was employed) who materializes at a Southern mansion looking for new blood, and finds it.
Everybody’s favorite director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) is dodging bill collectors who want him to pay for King Kong’s Big Apple antics and finds himself back on Skull Island with the lovely Helen Mack in this hastily-produced sequel. A family tragedy during production resulted in fx genius Willis O’Brien entrusting some of the animation to…
The last “official” appearance by a 52 year-old Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster gives this 1939 entry a melancholy tone that’s dispelled whenever Lionel Atwill and Bela Lugosi appear as the one-armed Inspector Krogh and the double-dealing Ygor. Basil Rathbone stars as the unflappable Wolf von Frankenstein though the notion of giving life to…
This‚ elaborate second remake of the French classic Wages of Fear (following Violent Road, a 1958 Howard W. Koch B-picture starring Brian Keith) suffered at the box office from its supernatural-sounding title (especially coming from the director of The Exorcist), which obscured its origins as a nail-biting suspense classic.‚ Two tough, grueling hours‚ that grab…
Director William Friedkin followed up his box office smash The Exorcist with this comparatively little-seen remake of Clouzot’s great The Wages of Fear. A pity because this star-crossed production (including hellish shooting conditions in the Dominican Republic) has much to offer featuring a suitably world-weary performance by Roy Scheider, rain-drenched photography by John Stephens and…
Jack Hill gives us the lowdown on the tsuris behind his spoofy low budget fantasy epic (credited onscreen to “Brian Stuart”), a paradigm of the kind of movies VHS was made for. Okay, there are no sorceresses to be seen, but we do get a pair of hot medieval barbarian twins, daughters of an evil…
Jennifer’s Body director Karyn Kusama takes us through the 1948 film version of Lucille Fletcher’s 1943 radio play, one of the most‚ successful and popular programs ever. It was reprised seven times through 1960, each time starring Agnes Moorehead in the tour-de-force lead as a bedridden woman who overhears a murder being plotted. After being…
Police investigate a ticking time bomb which turns out to be a metronome. That witty scene is the perfect set up for this low-budget, off-kilter comedy from Swedish directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärneabout about a band of “terrorist” musicians who express themselves via kidnapping and bank robberies and the tone deaf, music-hating cop determined…
Walter Hill’s 1981 thriller finds a National Guard unit trapped in a bloody cat-and-mouse game with local Cajuns in the Louisiana bayou. With its strong echoes of Deliverance, the film is suitably suspenseful and Hill’s direction is typically taut and efficient. Keith Carradine and Fred Ward star as two of the beleaguered guardsmen, the atmospheric…
Set in the distant future of 2022, Soylent Green is an ecological thriller with a twist ready-made for The Twilight Zone. Charlton Heston is a detective who discovers the synthetic food produced by the omniscient Soylent Corporation features a stomach-churning special ingredient. Richard Fleischer directs a terrific supporting cast including Chuck Conners, Joseph Cotten, and,…
This last in the Jack Arnold/William Alland series of ’50s sci-fi classics is a low key (and lower budget) plea for galactic peace and hasn’t been generally available for decades. But we’d like to think our revival of the trailer on TFH a few years ago factored in Olive Films’ decision to release it on…
Credited to Stanley Kubrick, taking over from Anthony Mann (whose casting choices appear in abundance)after 11 days of shooting, this troubled epic from revered Lefties Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast has become a touchstone of 60s cinema and for good reason — it’s less pious and more honestly moving than the comparatively overblown Ben-Hur.