Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words takes its title from a song found on the composer’s 1972 fusion album The Grand Wazoo, and there may be no better preparation for the Frank Zappa revealed in director Thorston Schutte’s extraordinary documentary than this command to consume, and then presumably digest and defecate out,…
The delightful British comedy The Smallest Show on Earth headlines a great Saturday matinee offering from the UCLA Film and Television Archive on June 25 as their excellent series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” wraps up. So it seemed like a perfect time to resurrect my review of the movie, which celebrates the collective experience…
In one of those strange confluences of life, death and documentary art, last week the world lost Muhammad Ali, humanitarian, devout Muslim and near inarguably the greatest boxer of all time (even if that assignation was initially self-proclaimed), just at the moment when the discussion about the life of yet another celebrity athlete, O.J. Simpson,…
“We used to go to the movies. Now we want the movies to come to us, on our televisions, tablets and phones, as streams running into an increasingly unnavigable ocean of media. The dispersal of movie watching across technologies and contexts follows the multiplexing of movie theaters, itself a fragmenting of the single screen theater…
John Flynn‘s The Outfit (1974), a brutally efficient bit of business based glancingly on Richard Stark’s procedurally inquisitive and poetic crime novel of the same name, is a movie that feels like it’s never heard of a rounded corner; it’s blunt like a 1970 Dodge Monaco pinning a couple of killers against a Dumpster and a brick…
If there is a reliable truism that can coexist alongside the American film industry’s dance of death with economically insane budgets that now routinely soar north of $200 million, it is that (most) critics and potential ticket-buyers can be counted on to review bad buzz and publicized woes of dollars and production instead of the…
Nearing the halfway mark of the movie year and teetering, as we all are, on the edge of another summer movie abyss which holds only the thinnest promise of providing strong reason to tread amongst the mall-igentsia in search of air-conditioned escape, I find myself feeling far less regret than usual over the movies I’ve…
Well, another year spent in the company of classic cinema curated by the TCM Classic Film Festival has come and gone, leaving me with several great experiences watching favorite films and ones I’d never before seen, some already cherished memories, and the usual weary bag of bones for a body in the aftermath. (I usually…
I live in Los Angeles, and my residency here means that a lot of great film programming– revival screenings, advance looks at upcoming releases and vital, fascinating glimpses at unheralded, unexpected cinema from around the world—is available to me on a week-by-week basis. But I’ve never been to Cannes. Toronto, Tribeca, New York, Venice, Berlin,…
I don’t know if The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the big, loud (except when its twin villainesses get all whispery with evil portent) prequel/sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman that nobody was clamoring for, will end up being the year’s worst movie. But in my book this by-the-numbers CGI-encrusted wreck certainly stands a good chance of being the year’s most…
A lot of water, legal and otherwise, has passed under the bridge since Paul Reubens last donned the signature crisply tailored gray suit and red bow tie of his indisputably great comic creation, Pee-wee Herman, for a feature-length comedy. His previous Pee-wee feature, Big Top Pee-wee, debuted during the summer of 1988, 28 years ago,…
Just a quick head-up: For those of you in the Los Angeles area, next weekend, April 22-24, marks the occasion for the second annual Artemis Women in Action Film Festival, playing at the newly refurbished Ahrya Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills. This festival, a labor of love project from athlete-actress Melanie Wise and writer-producers…
The icon-establishing performances Marilyn Monroe gave in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) are ones for the ages, touchstone works that endure because of the undeniable comic energy and desperation that sparked them from within even as the ravenous public became ever more enraptured by the…
Seeing Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934) again recently, my appetite was whetted to re-read Theodore Roszak’s Flicker, which uses Ulmer’s strange career as a master stylist exiled to a career toiling in B-movie obscurity as a jumping-off point for a sinister story engorged with a decadent and whispered history of movies. Three years…
By 1934 Boris Karloff was certainly no stranger to great movie entrances. In 1931, under the direction of James Whale, he seared his image, and that of the monstrous creation of Dr. Henry Frankenstein, into the collective consciousness by shuffling on screen and staring down his creator, and of course the terrified audience, embodying and…
(This is the first in an occasional series in which I remember some of the best double features I’ve been lucky enough to see projected in a theater.) The New Beverly Cinema, the oldest surviving revival theater in Los Angeles, has this week dished up a time-capsule glimpse into America’s popular obsession with CB, or…
Spotlight more or less ran the table at the Independent Spirit Awards last Saturday night in Santa Monica, picking up honors for Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Editing, as well as the Robert Altman Award for best ensemble cast. Brie Larson picked up yet another trophy for her great performance in…
It’s been such a good year at the movies that I’m a little bit surprised by the degree to which I’m approaching tomorrow night’s Academy Awards ceremony with something resembling… disinterest. And again, it’s not necessarily the movies. It’s hard to remember a year when there wasn’t at least one obvious howler among the five,…
Billy Wilder’s Buddy Buddy (1981) might be one of the most obvious go-to examples in the annals of conventional wisdom when it comes to the cinephile’s parlor game of pointing out a great director’s greatest foible. Upon release the movie was summarily dismissed by critics and ignored by audiences—it managed a paltry $7 million domestically,…
If you have been living and routinely interacting with other human beings over the last month, you’ve probably heard one or two words involving this year’s Academy Awards and the heated controversy over the startling lack of both films and people of color among the nominees. Personally, I think that the real focus of concern…
The SLIFR Movie Treehouse (the acronym stands in for the title of my blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule) is a place where I like to gather a few of my movie-writing pals and exchange long e-mails on the way the movies shaped up for us in the year just left behind. It’s…
This is definitely the time of year when film critic types (I’m sure you know who I mean) spend an inordinate amount of time leading up to awards season—and it all leads up to awards season, don’t it?—compiling lists and trying to convince anyone who will listen that it was a shitty year at the…
(This is a review of the roadshow version of The Hateful Eight, which will be screening in true 70MM in about 50 theaters across the country during the first two weeks after the movie’s release on Christmas Day. The same roadshow version will also screen in other venues digitally rather than on film. Before the…
Of the Big Three new wavers of German cinema—Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders– who “came of age” as it were in the ‘70s, when I was in college and my own stake in the movies was budding into something more learned and substantial than what it was when I first discovered my…
Despite its rampaging monster approach to the holiday season and the imposing, sort-of terrifying giant horned goat-man who provides its title, Krampus isn’t, at heart, an anti-Christmas picture– it has at least one bloodshot eye pitched toward seasonal classic status. The movie’s story is centered on a family at war with itself—semi-sophisticated suburbanites Adam Scott…
Paolo Sorrentino makes movies the way musicians create music—lingering themes swirl together with short spurts of philosophical flirtation and bawdy jokes, placid imagery routinely collides with florid representation and the occasional heavily laden visual metaphor. But they also have an ephemeral quality which suggests a certain resistance to the rigidity of interpretation, that the experience…