Two frenchwomen, played by Dominique Sanda and Geraldine Chaplin, go for a weekend outing and share stories about their past sexual escapades. The 1980 film, directed by Michel Deville, is most notable for its episodic flashback structure, derived from 15 different anecdotes by 15 different writers. With films like Le Lectrice (starring Miou-Miou), Deville found…
Jindrich Polak’s 1963 Czechslovakian space odyssey was originally titled Ikaria XB-1, the name of the spaceship on a mission to search for life in the stars of Alpha Centuri. Adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s novel The Magellenic Cloud, this austere and beautifully designed pic anticipates Tarkovsky’s Solaris and remains one of the best of the Eastern…
Celebrated cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s solo directorial debut is a haunting, transfixing tone poem about two children lost in the Australian outback and their relationship with a young aborigine on his coming-of-age “walkabout”. Roeg improvised much of the film from Edward Bond’s 14-page screenplay, based on a popular young adult novel. The first screen role of…
Is there a more‚ overlooked coming of age movie than this‚ little-seen Bronx-set drama from novelist Richard Price and director Phil Kaufman? Much like The Wild Bunch, these 1963 gang members find themselves on the road to oblivion in a changing society. Josh Olson brings this one back out into the sunlight.
Although it played mostly second feature dates, this‚ acclaimed Korean war‚ indie by the Sanders brothers (who began as second-unit directors on The Night of the Hunter) took home many kudos from international fim festivals.John Saxon is memorable in the lead as a soldier turned serial killer.‚ This‚ marked the beginning of a fruitful relationship…
George Pal’s pioneering H.G. Wells adaptation updates the action to 1953 Los Angeles, with Oscar-winning state-of-the-art visual FX and sound effects so great they’re still in use today.
One of Sergio Leone’s favorites, with Henry Fonda in a virtual dress rehearsal for his triumphant cold-blooded killer role in Once Upon a Time in the West. Fonda introduces the trailer for Edward Dmytryk’s unjustly neglected existential western, based on a novel drawn from the career of Wyatt Earp.
To commemorate the 7th anniversary of the Watts riots, Stax Records produced a soulful extravaganza bringing together many of their own acts including The Staple Singers, Albert King, and Issac Hayes as the headliner. Mel Stuart directed the film of the day-long event with Richard Pryor serving as the unofficial host. Three soundtrack albums were…
Often cited (by Stan Laurel himself) as a quintessential Laurel and Hardy vehicle, this modest western spoof showcases their gently abusive relationship with a minimum of dialog. The music score by Marvin Hatley was Oscar nominated! Although the team remains popular with the baby boomer generation, present day kids are woefully unfamiliar with L & H. Hopefully the affectionate new…
Fritz Leiber’s pulp novella “Conjure Wife”, which originally appeared in the April 1943 issue of Unknown Worlds, has had a surprisingly durable screen history. It was adapted here as the second entry in Universal’s Inner Sanctum Mystery series, then redone years later as an episode of the Moment of Fear TV show (1960). A classy…
A bitter ex-con employs a most, er, unusual weapon to knock off his enemies. Jamaa Fanaka’s UCLA student project is one of the rare such films to receive wide theatrical distribution (from drive-in kings Crown-International Pictures). Avoid the heavily cut reissue version titled Soul Vengeance.
In 1976 Robert Altman’s unofficial protégé Alan Rudolph directed this knowing dissection of Angelenos with an appropriately Altmanesque cast including Keith Carradine (in a near reprisal of his womanizing turn in Nashville), Sally Kellerman and Sissy Spacek (whose break-out role as Carrie was the same year). Rudolph, having punctuated his long and admirable directing career with…
Based on a short story by Graham Greene, this 1942 “what-if?” war film from the venerable Ealing Studios tells the story of a small British village overrun by invading German soldiers whose inhabitants strike back and violently murder their oppressors.The cast is equally venerable including Leslie Banks, Mervyn Johns and Basil Sydney. The director was Alberto Cavalcanti, who headlined that quintessential horror film omnibus, Dead of Night. Barely…
Before Universal introduced their own “official” werewolf legend in 1941’s The Wolf Man, the studio produced this trial run, directed by Stuart Walker and starring Henry Hull as a proto-Larry Talbot—he plays an unlucky explorer who changes into a snarling beast. Unlike Lon Chaney’s full-body transformation, Hull remains close to human form with only a…
One of the great titles. One of the great posters. One of the worst biker movies. Ever. Here’s Joe Dante’s original Film Bulletin review.
The title alone signifies how closely aligned the director was to his franchise and Wes Craven makes the most of it with this meta-spin on his Nightmare on Elm Street series. In a clever twist, this time out dreams aren’t responsible for summoning the dread specter of serial killer Freddy Krueger, it’s the movies themselves. Upping…
Wes Craven brings Freddy Krueger into the “real” world where he haunts the actual casts of previous Freddy films. Robert Englund dons the fiendish phantom’s fedora and former Elm Street mainstays like Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon play “themselves.” Craven paid for his cleverness at the box office, the film tanked even while garnering unusually positive…
When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet! Ten Academy Awards went to Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ enduringly popular screen version of the Romeo & Juliet-derived Broadway smash. New York City delayed the razing of several blocks in West Manhattan to provide tenement backgrounds for dance numbers. That area is now Lincoln Center. John Astin…
The second dramatic film shot in three-panel Cinerama, this sprawling all-star western epic came too late to save the process which was being replaced by a simpler single-lens system. Many action sequences were shot normally and converted to three-panel. By the time the brand-new Cinerama Dome in Hollywood opened in 1963 its initial “Cinerama” attraction, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad,…
Directed by William Wellman and released in 1951, this unusual western stars John McIntire as a rancher who plays matchmaker to a town full of lonely California cowpokes. Leading man Robert Taylor is the rangerider charged with shepherding the adventurous brides to be—a diverse band of city slickers more than capable of holding their own,…
Medical student-turned-novelist Michael Crichton’s directorial debut was the first of his cautionary futuristic-theme-park-gone-crazy thrillers (the second was Jurassic Park). The last picture produced by MGM before it stopped distributing movies became a huge popular hit and might have cut down somewhat on 1973 Disneyland admissions. The 1976 sequel Futureworld also figured into the popular 2016…
James Coburn, in one of his first starring roles, adopts many of producer-director Blake Edwards’ personal mannerisms as a Bilko-like lieutenant trying to trick a Sicilian town into surrendering during WW II. Intended as the first of a planned six coproductions between The Mirisch Company and Edwards, this one (based on a question his son…
Tom Noonan, an actor lauded for his villainous roles, is also an accomplished playwright, and this self-directed adaptation of his own off-broadway play reveals a sensitive side to the thespian better known as the serial killer in Michael Mann’s Manhunter. What Happened Was is nonetheless an intense and sometimes dark ride on that uniquely perilous rollercoaster known as dating. Noonan stars…
One of the most influential movies of the 1960s, Robert Aldrich’s celebrated Hollywood Gothic was the first movie to open widely in “Flagship Theaters” instead of playing initial dates in top urban houses and changed distributor release patterns forever more. It didn’t exactly hurt the late careers of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford either.
Writer Henry Farrell ushered in the horror-hag genre with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, but this later iteration went into production with the title The Best of Friends, only to be changed when judged too close to the Otto Preminger movie Such Good Friends. Cult director Curtis Harrington’s stylish period production suffered from the usual…
Woody Allen’s first stab at moviemaking is still one of his funniest. “Key of Keys”, a low budget Japanese spy movie, is recut and entirely redubbed into a free-form comedy in which the Macguffin is the world’s greatest egg salad recipe. A huge favorite on college campuses in the late sixties, this exists in several…