Frank Capra was known for such upstanding, optimistic films (“Capra-corn” to the critics) that his lone Christmas-themed film must have come as a real shock to ticket buyers. It’s A Wonderful Life has its cheery side for sure, but it also contains moments so bleak it makes some film noirs look like Mary Poppins. A…
Frank Capra was known for such upstanding, optimistic films (“Capra-corn” to the critics) that his lone Christmas-themed film must have come as a real shock to ticket buyers. It’s a Wonderful Life has its cheery side for sure, but it also contains moments so bleak it makes some film noirs look like Mary Poppins. A…
Michael Wadleigh’s game-changing document of the 500,000 strong 1969 New York music festival exists in so many different versions it’s almost impossible to keep track of them. But all have influenced documentarians for decades as well as providing a lasting income source for Time Warner.
Mike Nichols puts a glossy 80’s spin on what is essentially the plot of a Warner Bros. potboiler from the 30’s. Melanie Griffith plays the feisty career gal who stands up to a platoon of industry ogres to get what’s rightfully hers. Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Spacey and Oliver Platt are among the corporate creeps while…
Peter Sellers is the titular self-absorbed pianist, but George Roy Hill’s charming, bittersweet‚ film belongs to the two young girls who idolize him. New York City at its most attractive is almost a character in itself, thanks to Boris Kaufman’s sparkling cinematography. Here is a 2012 New Yorker recap of the later events in the lives of the…
First of the runaway-planet-soon-to-hit-Earth movies, remade and ripped off so frequently in recent years that no less than Lars Von Trier has one coming up soon! Cecil B. DeMille considered making this for Paramount in 1935, but it wasn’t until 1951 that George Pal was able to get it up and running, albeit with a…
The most operatic of Weimar emigre Douglas Sirk’s flamboyant imitations of life, this deliberately artificial yet incisive slice of Americana documents the fall of a powerful Texas oil family and is considered by many to be the director’s masterpiece. It’s one of the great Hollywood movies, encapsulating the lurid Universal-International unreality of the 1950s.
Movies set in the near future are sometimes rendered moot by subsequent events, but Richard Brooks’ bizarrely prescient political satire makes more sense in a post 9/11 world than it did in 1982. Only nominally based on Charles McCarry’s espionage novel “The Better Angels”, this adaptation takes a comparatively minor character, newshound Patrick Hale, and…
Prescient in more ways than one, Stuart Rosenberg’s bleak melodrama stars Paul Newman as a disk jockey at WUSA, a right wing radio station whose race baiting diatribes trigger a violent uprising. Joanne Woodward, Pat Hingle, and Anthony Perkins, make up the formidable supporting cast. Mocked as over the top in 1970, Robert Stone’s cautionary screenplay was just a…
It’s not exactly The Lost Weekend, but Oscar-winner Ray Milland does pretty well for himself by this low-budget but intriguingly Promethean 1963 sci-fi outing from Roger Corman, which anticipates the alternate reality concepts of his later The Trip. Of course the trailer is more interested in the “X-ray specs” aspects of the idea, like seeing…
A radioactive blob terrorizes the Scottish highlands in this low key but suspenseful thriller. Hammer’s attempt to continue the adventures of Professor Quatermass on its own was squelched by series creator Nigel Kneale, but even with the name change the result still plays like Quatermass 1 1/2.
Peter Weir’s superb political thriller set against the upheaval of Sukarno’s Indonesia is suspenseful, smart and beautifully acted with top honors going to Linda Hunt’s gender-bending triumph as photo-journalist Billy Kwan who strikes the romantic sparks between the more conventional duo played by Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. The title was Sukarno’s prophetic phrase for…
William Wellman, known for “adult” westerns like The Ox-Bow Incident, continues in that mode with an Old West fable based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Gregory Peck and Richard Widmark are outlaws who find sanctuary in a ghost town ruled by Anne Baxter and her prospecting grandfather. Sumptuous black and white cinematography by Joseph MacDonald who…
Only a Blue Meanie could hate George Dunning’s limited animation classic, which screwed the psychedelic cap onto the 1968 toothpaste that also included Kubrick’s 2001 and predated MTV music videos by some 12 years.
John Barry’s elegiac score and Freddie Young’s improbably beautiful photography combine to make Lewis Gilbert’s 1967 film the most glamorous of Sean Connery’s Bond outings. An action-packed travelogue set within neon-soaked Tokyo and the storybook environs of the Japanese countryside, 007 plays cat and mouse with Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld in a volcano that doubles as…
Worlds collide in this 1940 musical-comedy-horror film directed by David Butler (a Hollywood vet best known for breezy low-budget fare like Road to Morocco) but it’s up to the audience to decide who’s scarier… co-stars Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi or bandleader Kay Kyser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge. To their credit Karloff and crew retain…
Mark Chao stars as the monster-hunting detective Dee Renjie in Tsui Hark’s extravagant fantasy with enough creature-feature action for a Ray Harryhausen film. It’s a prequel to Hark’s widely acclaimed 2010 epic, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame.
Mel Brooks’ affectionate comic homage to the Universal Frankenstein movies piles on every cliche and cartoony plot twist from the first five series entries, with appropriate attention paid to the original art direction and camera setups. When Columbia balked at the budget and black and white photography, Brooks took it to 20th Century Fox. A…
Delmer Daves directed this glossy soap opera about the rise and fall of a truck driver turned best-selling novelist. James Franciscus plays Youngblood Hawke, the country boy spoiled by too much, too soon, and Susanne Pleshette plays his lovestruck book editor. Loosely based on the life of Thomas Wolfe (probably the reason for the extra…
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1966 comedy about a love-starved nebbish boasts a daunting cast, including Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, and Rip Torn. Peter Kastner plays the teenager kicked out of the nest by his gruff father—fortunately (or not) he falls right into the arms of the ethereal Elizabeth Hartman. A bittersweet film if ever there was,…
Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English language film, Blow-Up, was a surprise worldwide hit for MGM which permitted him to follow it up with a big-scale X-rated art film set in America. In production for over two years, it tanked big time, grossing less an $1 million on a $7 million investment and drawing withering reviews. Time…
Here I finally present It’s a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point, a feature-length essay film that began as an editing mashup, a bit o’ fun with found footage, and ended as a pop meditation on American iconography and mythologies, a cine-exegesis of the American desert through the prism of both culture and counterculture, and a very…
John Boorman proves that with Sean Connery as your star, you can make any movie you want—that movie is Zardoz and it must be seen to be disbelieved. An airborne statue whose stony grimace dominates a futuristic hellscape, Zardoz is a memorably bizarre figurehead of the authoritarian future. But as the space-age anti-hero named Zed,…
Pupi Avati’s 1983 zombie thriller Zeder features old-fashioned storytelling and new-fashioned gore along with a little sci-fi and some psychic shenanigans. Also known as Revenge of the Dead, the movie reanimates a classic horror movie trope: a mysterious scientist’s efforts to revive the dead lead to predictable disaster.
Originally promoted as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, this is also known as Zombie 2(!), Zombie Flesh Eaters and numerous other titles. It’s sort of a Trailers from Hell milestone–our first Lucio Fuci trailer! And who better to dissect it than the director of Hellboy?
Producer Stanley Baker stars in Cy Endfield’s epic recreation of the 1879 Battle of Rorke’s Drift, in which 1000 stiff-upper-lip British soldiers gave a good account of themselves in a battle with 4000 Zulu warriors. Not scrupulously accurate, but rousing and excitingly staged, with a great John Barry score.