TV’s Norman Lear produced William Friedkin’s good-natured farce about early American burlesque houses and the inadvertent invention of the striptease. Jason Robards plays a fast talking vaudevillian and Britt Ekland is Rachel Schpitendavel, a showbiz hopeful who hits the big time by losing her clothes. The supporting cast is a who’s who of comedians including…
This brutal revenge drama was director Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to her sleeper hit, The Babadook. Irish actress Aisling Franciosi plays a convict named Clare Carroll whose abuse at the hands of her captors is only the beginning of the nightmare visited upon her and her family. Some scenes were so grueling therapists were made available…
Stop motion animator Henry Selick made his feature film debut with this macabre yuletide fairy tale based on a poem by Tim Burton; the darkly comic result resembles a George Pal Puppetoon directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Chris Sarandon lends his voice to the film’s spindly hero, Jack Skellington, who brings the Christmas spirit to the…
It would seem that too many years had passed for this belated attempt to turn the popular Get Smart spy comedy series into a feature film to succeed, yet astonishingly it was a boxoffice hit despite its many departures from the spirit of the original. Brit Clive Donner may have seemed an odd choice to…
Probably Jerry Lewis’s most enduring film, and the one that sparked a critical reappraisal of his entire ouvre, this variation on The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll has inspired not only a 1996 Eddie Murphy remake and followup but an animated direct-to-video sequel and a proposed Broadway musical version directed by Jerry with music by…
A supernatural take on The Bad Seed, director Richard Donner’s 1976 thriller about a demonic child boasts a top-notch “old Hollywood” cast including Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. Gilbert Taylor (A Hard Day’s Night) did the cinematography and composer Jerry Goldsmith’s work was rewarded with the Academy Award for Best Score. This cash cow spawned three sequels…
This creepy, bucolic period horror film didn’t make much of an impression theatrically, but was rediscovered through late-night television airings. Although former actor turned best-selling author Tom Tryon wrote the screenplay from his own novel, he professed to be disappointed with To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan’s nostalgia-laced, Ray Bradburyish handling of it. Composer…
The story of The Other Side of the Wind – a film begun by Orson Welles in 1970 that finally arrived in theaters in 2018 – encapsulates the ongoing struggles of the great director when it came to getting a movie made. Finally assembled long after Welles’ death by Peter Bogdanovich, Frank Marshall and editor…
This troubled production is considered by Clint Eastwood to be one of his best films. Audiences and critics agreed. Producer Eastwood was annoyed by director Philip Kaufman’s meticulous attention to detail and had him replaced by Eastwood himself, leading to a Directors Guild of America fine and the installation of The Eastwood Rule, designed to…
This is the oldest title we’ve ever featured on this site, mainly because it’s not easy to come up with silent-era trailers. Justly celebrated for Lon Chaney’s amazing performance and makeup, the film itself is a tattered amalgam of rewrites, reshoots and recuts, further complicated by more shooting for a sound-on-disc reissue. Originally all the…
Cary Grant starring in a Hammer Film? It almost happened! After a stillborn incarnation as an in-house Universal domestic production from producer William Alland, this third film version of Gaston Leroux’s warhorse finally emerged via Hammer with Herbert Lom in a very underrated performance as the benighted Phantom. When televised on NBC, the more intense…
Here’s a beloved bargain-basement gobbler that impressed little Micky Garris in 1961. It’s an amusing riff on Gulliver’s Travels with lots of ambition and little resource. Co-star Coleen Gray must have been wondering how she got from Kubrick’s The Killing to this in only five years!
This 1948 Vincente Minnelli musical could just as easily been titled The Technicolor Pirate, so blazingly vivid is the photography. The film itself, unfortunately, is not that blazing, the result of a troubled production history (it took four months to film) and on-set tension between Minnelli and his wife and star of the film, Judy Garland. It does have…
There aren’t a lot of movies about Huguenots, but this landlocked pirate epic is one of them. Christopher Lee steals the show as a ruthless pirate captain invading an island settlement looking for treasure. Made as part of Hammer’s coproduction deal with Columbia, American contract players Kerwin Mathews and Glenn Corbett seem a bit out…
After a brief detour working in television and off Broadway, Robert Altman returned to the big screen with a vengeance in 1992’s The Player. Based on Michael Tolkin’s book about a murderous movie producer, the black-comic material seemed ready made for the acerbic director. Starring Tim Robbins as the guilty studio head, the film begins…
The posters for Irwin Allen’s 1972 disaster epic screamed “Hell Upside Down!” – in other words, the perfect movie for 2019. The canny Allen brought in A list actors like Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters and made sure all the thriller buttons were pushed in this waterlogged saga about the spectacular upending of a leaky…
Albert Zugsmith and Mickey Rooney’s 1960 film about a band of misfits transported back to the Garden of Eden plays like a sexploitation farce written by Rod Serling. The movie never lives up to the salacious possibilities of its title but with its wacky casting coups (including Rooney as the devil and Mamie Van Doren…
All-star cold war thrills from the writer of North By Northwest set against the colorful background of the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm. The basic plot gimmick involving dual roles for Edward G. Robinson was later lifted for a Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie, The Spy with My Face. The huge cast is tops. Britt Ekland…
A quintessential piece of Hollywood craftsmanship, Richard Brooks’ post-Mexican revolutionary western is star-studded, action packed and completely satisfying.
Directed by Gregory Widen, The Prophecy features the scrambled plot and supernatural characterizations of a Marvel Universe movie. Christoper Walken plays the angel Gabriel, who comes to earth in search of a useful “evil” soul but has to deal with the angel Simon, played by Eric Stoltz. Different, to be sure, the film sports a…
Jack Clayton’s moody tone poem stands alongside Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Shoot the Moon as one of the more coruscating portraits of a troubled marriage. While Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch trade blows as the unhappy couple, a devious James Mason pulls the strings on the sidelines. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay, Oswald…
It was bound to happen, The Puppetoons meet Gumby in Arnold Leibovit’s 1987 tribute to director/animator George Pal. The film features 11 of the shorts Pal made between 1933 and 1948, some of the most charming animation ever produced – the essence of childhood fantasy. Pal’s classic work is also supplemented by newly animated wraparound…
One of the more unique projects of the decade, director/writer Michael Tolkin’s disturbing 1991 religious fantasy tells the story of Sharon (Mimi Rogers), a young libertine converted to born-again Christianity, who takes drastic measures to ensure that the coming “Rapture” will “save” her young daughter. It’s provocative, to say the least, and in his debut…
Audie Murphy goes back to war and doesn’t like it. Still the best film version of Stephen Crane’s classic Civil War saga despite being metaphorically dragged from the back of a truck by MGM. Murphy reportedly offered to buy the picture back from MGM and let Huston re-edit it, but it was not to be….
You can’t keep a good man down. Despite being killed off in the original, the natty LA vampire’s on the loose again in a somewhat more elaborate but still chintzy sequel. The last screen appearance of longtime movie villain George Macready, whose son produced. A planned sequel with Yorga creating a zombie army in underground…
A studio contract player has to accept what he’s assigned to, which explains Bogart’s presence in this 1939 horror sequel from the Warner B unit. Hardly his finest hour, but Bogart doesn’t phone it in.