Patrick Dennis’ witty 1955‚ best-seller about a boy and his‚ larger-than- life‚ socialite aunt became a Broadway smash when adapted by Jerome Roberts and Robert E. Lee with Rosalind Russell in the lead. Its director, Morton da Costa, made the leap to Hollywood when the play was filmed in 1958 and‚ became the highest-grosser of…

Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s ingenious but somewhat plot-heavy black comedy is mainly remembered today for the demure Juliet Mills’ cheery skinny-dipping scene with the eternally flustered Jack Lemmon. Lemmon travels to Naples to investigate the peculiar demise of both his father and his father’s mistress (Mills’ mother). Naturally our two leads begin to emulate…

Further proof the 1970s were (was?) the wildest decade in film history.‚ “Special needs” have never been so special as in this weirdo melodrama about a trio of women bringing up a fully grown man as a baby in diapers and a crib. Mainstream director Ted Post seems a little miscast as the ringmaster of…

Today it’s difficult to conceive just how scandalous Elia Kazan’s steamy adaptation of two Tennessee Williams playlets really was in 1956. Condemned from church pulpits and picketed by (naturally) people who’d never seen it, this saga of a child bride in rural Mississippi was actually withdrawn from numerous theaters before its opening day.

Barbara Stanwyck’s spiky strumpet literally sleeps her way to the top in Baby Face, the Sui Generis of pre-code films that made Warner Bros. ground zero for salacious entertainment before Will Hays spoiled the party. Though Stanwyck’s character engages in situations that would raise eyebrows even in 2024, she naturally has a heart of gold…

It’s not exactly Ozploitation, but director Rolf de Heer’s outrageous “experiment” (his words) packs in as much violent mayhem, weird sex and  non-P.C. material as any exploitation film you can think of. Its unusual deployment of 31 different directors of photography guarantees a variety of looks as our shut-in hero makes his first grimly comic foray…

John Sturges’ formalist masterpiece is also a progressive studio movie confronting post-WW2 racism. Andre Previn’s possibly career-best music score turns up again in, of all places, the Forbidden Planet trailer!

Werner Herzog’s weird non-sequel to Abel Ferrera’s Bad Lieutenant is one of the wildest flyers a director has taken with someone else’s material, especially considering it’s completely divorced from the original. It’s certainly bizarre, and not since star Nic Cage devoured a cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss has he gone so far out on an acting…

Seemingly concocted by director Terry Zwigoff as an antidote to the sugary Christmas movies that have clogged the arteries of moviegoers for so many years, this 2003 film about a disreputable Santa impersonator makes good on its promise of bad taste, bad manners and bad Santas. Produced by the Coen Brothers and starring a convincingly dissipated…

Aliens harvest humans for fast food in Peter Jackson’s mini-budget gross-out New Zealand film debut, poorly distributed and often banned in various censored versions until he hit pay dirt with Lord of the Rings. Having suddenly acquired respectability, it is now widely regarded as an essential cult film, ironically depriving it of true cult status.

AKA: Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession. Nicolas Roeg followed The Man Who Fell to Earth with this‚ challenging, equally non-linear study of psychosexual compulsion, which begins in the middle, jumps to the end and then back to a prologue, all in the first five minutes. Great use of music by Tom Waits, the Who, Billie…

In Howard Hawks’ 1941 comedy, Barbara Stanwyck plays a stripper with a penchant for snappy patter and Gary Cooper is the bookish grammarian who decides she’s a suitable case for study. Cooper is surrounded by a like-minded bunch of fussbudgets based on the seven dwarves making Stanwyck’s character a very unlikely Snow White. Billy Wilder…

“He found water where it wasn’t”. Hardly seen even in its day, this is yet another troubled Sam Peckinpah project which nonetheless emerged as a lyrical, deeply personal western love story that stands with the very best of his work. Its failure led the director to consider abandoning westerns once and for all. Although she…

In the top five of child-traumatizing films is Walt Disney’s 1942 tear-jerker, Bambi. Exquisitely animated in Disney’s sumptuous early style, the film traces the steps of a motherless fawn finding his way in a treacherous, if beautiful, new world.

Very smart and very silly, Woody Allen solidified his standing as a Groucho Marx for the new generation in Bananas, a throwback to the Marx Brothers’ absurdist comedies of the thirties shot through the cynical prism of Nixon’s seventies. In this 1971 farce, Woody finds himself propped up as the political leader of a Latin…

Vincente Minnelli, Arthur Freed and Comden & Greene’s timeless classic is the musical for people who don’t like musicals: so clever, so witty and so brilliantly executed that the usual objections to musical numbers “stopping the story” don’t apply. The music is the story, a sophisticated backstage Broadway trifle steeped in artifice but fabulously entertaining….

Ron Fricke’s 1992 documentary celebrating the natural beauty of the world and its cultures makes full use of a little-used but glorious photographic process, 70 mm Todd-AO. That crystal clear format was used for 1956’s Around the World in 80 Days and Fricke takes that as a challenge, traveling to 24 countries on six continents to assemble…

Hoping to capitalize on the success of Conan the Barbarian, Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures partnered with director Héctor Olivera for this sword and sandal fantasy filmed in Argentina. Lana Clarkson plays a fur-clad warrior who can out-battle any brawny adversary but somehow finds herself in situations better suited to a Hooters waitress. Co-starring TFH Guru…

Mickey Rourke’s booze-soaked lead role in poet Charles Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical bar-crawling memoir was first offered to Sean Penn, who wanted Dennis Hopper to direct, but the script had been commissioned by French director Barbet Schroeder, so he ended up directing it as one of the rare Cannon Film productions to play the Cannes Film Festival.

In the early eighties Hollywood was glutted with so-called “erotic thrillers” combining soft-core sex and hard core violence that usually went straight to cable and video. In 1992, Paul Verhoeven took that same trashy template and directed Basic Instinct, a big-budget exploitation film which didn’t stint on its garishly amusing scenes of sex and violence,…

Although the wacky tv show was a national craze, this 1966 feature version didn’t do much business, since audiences could see the same thing for free in their living rooms. Probably not what Bob Kane had in mind, but it sure put Batman back on the map and led to the later megahit movies.

This quintessential New World picture from producer Roger Corman features a jaw-dropping array of behind-the-scenes talent including a score from James Horner, a script from John Sayles and art direction from James Cameron. Starring Richard Thomas, the supporting cast is equally impressive, including turns from Sam Jaffe, Sybil Danning, George Peppard, John Saxon and Robert…

The fairly elaborate 1959 Soviet space-race movie The Heavens Call was acquired in 1962 by Roger Corman, who assigned fledgling filmmaker Francis Coppola to rejigger it for the US market by cutting, rewriting and dubbing it into a propaganda-free second feature. But those literal-minded Russkies had neglected to include the most important aspect of any…

The flat plains of Spain make a visually inaccurate backdrop for this sprawling but largely fanciful recreation of one of the major operations of World War II, which actually took place across the forests of Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. It’s a nearly three hour Roadshow spectacle with the usual all star cast, efficiently showcased by…

Last and least of the Apes series tries to bring the story full circle but suffers from tv-style production values and haphazard last-minute re-cutting‚ to reduce the‚ violence‚ and‚ secure a PG rating. The uncut version is now available on Blu-Ray.

In this controversial career-capping Japanese thriller from director Kinji Fukasaku, middle-school children are rounded up by the government and sent to an island where they’re made to compete in a particularly nasty game of hide and seek: each child must kill the other in order to win. The shocking premise and worldwide acclaim led several American distributors to…