Terence Fisher returns to direct the first (and best?) of six sequels to the groundbreaking Curse of Frankenstein, bringing new complexity and plenty of gallows humor to the character of Baron Frankenstein, the alternately malevolent and admirable protagonist whose grand experiments just never seem to work out.
In its time the most expensive French film ever made, Jean Renoir’s 1939 tragicomedy takes a scalpel to the upper class and their casual cruelty. After a flurry of bad reviews, Renoir took a scalpel to the film itself, but even a shortened version couldn’t appease critics which included the French government—they banned the film…
It took decades for this sleaze classic to be appreciated. It provided Vilmos Zsigmond with his first solo d.p. credit (as William Zsigmond), and it looks terrific. Grinning lunatic Arch Hall Jr. terrorizes three teachers in a desert junk yard for 94 real-time minutes in a little-seen but powerfully intense mini-budget drive-in staple. Hall even resembles Charles Starkweather,…
John Sturges’ 1965 film flaunts Cold War thrills and Strangelovian plot turns worthy of an Alistair MacLean novel – which is just where the story came from. It’s a typically solid Sturges production with prime work from cinematographer Robert Surtees and composer Jerry Goldsmith. Star George Maharis is a colorless leading man but vets Richard…
Last of the Hammer Draculas. A barely seen swan song, general neglect has relegated this one to the fuzzy world of the public domain, where it can be had most anywhere for 99 cents as well as part of various cheapo “100 Horror Classics” DVD boxes.
Los Angeles and its inhabitants are presented in the starkest of terms in this faux documentary written and directed by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick. Produced over a four-year period, Haskell Wexler was one of three cinematographers who followed the seemingly aimless journey of Barbara Baxley as Judith X, a divorcée adrift in…
Director Clio Barnard’s 2013 film is an unflinching look at the hard scrabble lives of two teenage misfits growing up in a poverty-stricken area of post-Thatcher England. The two boys, who earn their money collecting and selling scrap metal, fall in with a Fagin-like dealer whose shady ways lead to inevitable tragedy. The film was very…
Jeffrey Konvitz’s best-selling horror novel was brought to the screen by Michael Winner, considered in some circles one of cinema’s great vulgarians. With the aid of a top-notch cast Winner threw any notion of good taste to the winds, resulting in one of the most non-p.c. studio movies ever.
Russ Meyer, legendary for his lascivious approach to cheerfully lurid fare like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Vixen, plays it relatively straight in this adaptation of trash-meister Irving Wallace’s free-speech manifesto on pornography. The result is neither fish nor fowl and something that had never existed till The Seven Minutes – a dull Russ Meyer movie….
Vienna-born Fred Zinnemann’s first major MGM directorial assignment is an uncommonly intelligent and well researched anti-Nazi film. Spencer Tracy plays an embittered escapee from a concentration camp whose faith in humanity is restored when others help him reach the Dutch border. Adding authenticity is the unbilled presence in the cast of several actual German refugees,…
Even Jerry Goldsmith’s score and an oddball supporting cast – including Tim Curry and Jonathan Winters – couldn’t hypnotize moviegoers into making Martin Bregman’s 1994 thriller a hit. Alec Baldwin stars as The Shadow, a crime-fighting master of mind-control inspired by 30’s pulp fiction and a popular radio show. The film opened to both indifferent critics and…
Stanley Kubrick’s stylish adaptation of Stephen King’s popular novel was pilloried by disappointed King fans who railed against its infidelity to the book, but it went on to become the hit that Kubrick was looking for after the commercial failure of Barry Lyndon. Now, of course, thanks to the recent documentary Room 237, we know…
Two bickering shop attendants each find solace in the romantic letters they receive from secret admirers. Of course those unknown admirers are themselves and thereby hangs the plot of Ernst Lubitsch’s gently comic masterpiece starring Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart and Frank Morgan. Movies don’t get more transparently soulful, touching or funny as this 1940 film. It’s practically perfect.
A few years after the success of Deep End, Jerzy Skolimowski directed this equally unsettling drama starring Alan Bates as Crossley, a sinister nomad with supernatural powers. John Hurt and Susannah York are the young couple caught up in the shaman’s web. The film received Grand Prize at the 1978 Cannes Festival.
Director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s brash melodrama about the Tet Offensive underscores the action with a thoughtful subtext about the futility of war. Starring Wings Hauser and Full Metal Jacket’s foul-mouthed gunnery sergeant R. Lee Ermey, the 1989 film was written by Ermey as well. Gritty and action-packed, the film has acquired quite the cult following among…
A perennial cult film, Daryl Duke’s ingenious and suspenseful thriller about a bank teller who two-times a bank robber with disastrous consequences gathers new fans every day. Elliot Gould shines in his tailor made part as the unlucky clerk while the brilliant Christopher Plummer portrays one of the most unnerving villains in screen history.
With enough plot turns for a 12 chapter serial, this 61 minute pre-code thriller stars 34 year-old Neil Hamilton (Batman’s eventual Commissioner Gordon) as a silk merchant and Guy Kibbee as a detective trapped aboard a train carrying gangsters, scientists and an unexpected hero not revealed till the movie’s final destination.
“Jim Brown goes over the wall to flash with a million dollar stash!” The former footballer’s 15th feature is one of this toughest, ably assembled by director Jonathan Kaplan in only his third feature, and first outside the Corman factory. This one has never been available on home video in any form until now.
As the psychotic delivery man whose hatred is reserved for women, Arthur Franz found the perfect vehicle for his flinty personality in this 1952 policier from director Edward Dmytryk. Produced by Stanley Kramer, the film is notable for cinematographer Burnett Guffey’s neo-realist take on the Bay Area locale. Franz must have been disappointed that this…
Directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, The Son is a bundle of dynamite just waiting to go off. Olivier Gourmet is a cold-hearted carpenter and Morgan Marinne is his new apprentice, each holding a different piece of a sinister puzzle. A uniquely disturbing mystery, the film garnered excellent reviews and Gourmet received the Best Actor…
Roger Corman takes us behind the scenes on one of his rare big studio projects, a detailed and largely accurate account of the 1929 mass murder of Bugs Moran’s Northside Gang in a Chicago garage. George Segal plays the ill-fated, not to mention henpecked, Frank Gusenberg. Paul Frees narrates as the voice of doom, chronicling…
In the aftermath of a police shooting, a band of mercenaries huddle inside a warehouse, each one a suspect in the killing. James Badge plays a classically conflicted character, an ex-cop and current militia member who’s more interested in justice than saving his skin. Premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in 2018, Henry Dunham’s intense…
In a decade of oddities, Paul Sylbert’s 1971 satire is high on the list of unconventional entertainments. Set in the fall of 1962, Richard Benjamin plays a professor so unnerved by the Cuban missile crisis he sets out on a cross-country tour of America, changing his identity in each new city. Chill Wills and Cloris…
Character actor Terry O’Quinn makes the most of his greatest role in Joseph Ruben’s sleeper hit about a fastidious serial killer who moves from family to family on a black-hearted killing spree. Stepfathers II and III followed in 1989 and 1992, and a remake was loosed on an uncaring world in 2009.
The melancholy story of the brief affair between a black soldier and a white waitress in Paris circa 1967, The Story of a Three-Day Pass was Melvin Van Peebles’s first feature length film. Filmed over six weeks at the cost of $200,000, the movie stars Harry Baird and Nicole Berger (Thérèse in Truffaut’s Shoot the…
As sunny as Eraserhead was dark, David Lynch’s The Straight Story tells the tale of Alvin Straight’s (Richard Farnsworth) journey to visit his estranged brother. This being a Lynch film, Alvin makes the cross-country trip on top of a John Deere lawnmower, clocking in at a steady five miles an hour. It’s also a true story…