Mexican showbiz from the wrong side of the tracks: it’s big, it’s vulgar, it’s overcooked: but it’s highly effective cinema with sensational authentic music, terrific images and a vivacious star to promote. Cuban fireball Ninón Sevilla dances up a storm for her star vehicle, reportedly insisting on Mexico’s best behind the camera: director Emilio Fernández…
Originally made for Public Television, R.O. Blechman’s adaptation of Stravinsky’s theater piece combines a score of animation techniques within the illustrator’s eccentric, expressive personal style. A soldier returning from war makes a deal with the Devil, trading his violin for a book that tells the future. The message is ‘You can’t go home again’ with…
This in-the-wilds thriller about Sardinian shepherds that become outlaws is an almost perfect movie experience, and truer to Italian neorealist theory than the accepted classics. Director Vittorio De Seta filmed on location with almost no crew, using actual shepherds for actors — and comes back with a masterpiece hailed by film festivals as the best…
Morricone fans and students of music will discover a real treat in Giuseppe Tornatore’s exhaustive, comprehensive epic documentary of All Things Ennio. With Il Maestro’s full cooperation, we get a life history and direct coverage of his greatest accomplishments, and the ‘musique concrète’ ethic that inspired things like coyote screams in ‘The Good, The Bad…
No, it’s not a new disc … CineSavant updates an older review to take in Warner’s 2018 4K edition — mainly to wax enthusiastic about the long-gone thrill of Road Show moviegoing. We have the story of when (and where) Stanley Kubrick trimmed the movie by a reel, in its first week of release in…
David Lynch’s dark vision of vice and cruelty beneath a quiet rural town solidified his rep as The Most Out-There big-studio director. Kyle Maclachlan’s curious Jeffrey can relate to Laura Dern’s sweet teenager, but he’s also drawn to Isabella Rossellini’s disturbed victim of sexual tyranny. With his tank of amyl nitrite gas, Dennis Hopper’s Frank…
Old-school Hollywood romance is back in force. This pre-Code dazzler by Frank Borzage is one of the best, emotionally valid despite its dated gender assumptions. The innocent Loretta Young adores Spencer Tracy’s charming lout — their meet-cute finds them homeless and helpless in a Manhattan shanty town at the bottom of the Depression. The new…
This masterpiece qualifies as a ‘period neo-noir’ despite being produced before the noir craze found traction. The murder of a city commissioner reveals a dark, greedy chapter in the history of Our City of the Angels. Robert Evans’ studio production found a perfect roster of collaborators for Robert Towne’s screenplay. Romantic and suspenseful, it’s a…
The most accessible of the pictures director Edward Dmytryk made during his brief political exile in England is this tight ‘perfect crime’ murder thriller. A jealous husband plots to do away with his wife’s lover — keeping him alive in a ‘Hidden Room’ (the American release title) until he’s sure Scotland Yard has lost the…
A previously scarce John Sayles films surfaces in a beautiful widescreen edition. Cynicism and frustration pits a town against itself, in a story of civic trouble that echoes Bruce Springsteen’s laments for America’s crumbling cities. Builder Tony Lo Bianco is in hock to the Mob, and can’t pretend he’s not part of the corruption; activist…
It’s the kind of movie we get dragged to see … which then becomes a respected favorite. Robert Anderson, Fred Zinnemann and Audrey Hepburn’s interpretation of Kathryn C. Hulme’s book is a stunningly mature woman’s odyssey, about a young nun’s attempt to find fulfillment in a a demanding social-spiritual vocation, that seeks to reconstruct its…
Stanley Kubrick’s early work can tell us a lot about the artist, as might a collection of Da Vinci or Renoir sketch books. His tentative first feature has big problems — a ponderous script and war-movie ambitions it can’t deliver — but qualifies as a noble, promising first effort, especially because he was such a…
Come back to the middle 1960s, when America’s hottest film student Francis Ford Coppola started on his path to directorial glory by parlaying his UCLA film school thesis film into a full-on studio production. A canny synthesis of youth trends and Coppola’s own weird sense of humor, the free-form comedy announces ‘I’ve arrived.’ The music…
Good news for sci-fi fans; Kino’s newly remastered trio of monsterrific thrillers looks great. The favorite Paramount semi-classic The Colossus of New York still impresses with its haunting piano score and solemn direction by Eugène Lourié. The gooey fungus freakout The Unknown Terror is available domestically for the first time in its full ‘Regalscope’ glory….
Michael Powell and Leo Marks encode their tale of a sick serial killer with 1001 wicked observations, insights and unflattering jokes about everything cinematic, emphasizing voyeuristic excess and obsession. Carl Boehm’s protagonist is a ‘very British Psycho’ who conducts his murderous crusade like an explorer in taboo territory, and fetishizes his cameras as sexual objects….
Jessamyn West’s bright vision of America’s agrarian dream has plenty to say about anxious times: a family of Quakers try to maintain their values against secular temptation, and the threat of Civil War. Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire star, with Anthony Perkins, Phyllis Love and Richard Eyer. Sentimental, insightful and very funny, it earns its…
Francis Ford Coppola’s first personal film through his Zoetrope experiment is an acting tour-de-force for Shirley Knight, a purposely marginal road movie in search of cinema truth. It comes out as an honorable attempt to meld Americana and European ‘film honesty;’ what we really admire is Coppola’s expert direction of Knight and her co-stars, James…
When is a horror movie not a horror movie? Does the absence of most horror content make a difference? This Regal Films ‘Regalscope’ production is handsomely filmed and shot on location, but it feels like a stack of disconnected ideas. Lovely Peggie Castle is possessed, and Arthur Franz and Marsha Hunt don’t know what to…
Shot for shot, David Lynch’s galactic epic is as brilliant as any of his films, with vivid characterizations, strong performances and a parade of weird, strikingly Lynchian visuals. The bizarre Lynch sensibility is a good match for Frank Herbert’s complicated saga; Viavision’s Limited Edition is the first Region A Blu-ray to offer both the Theatrical…
Radiance comes through again, giving us Mario Bava’s haunted space opera in multiple versions. The original Italian encoding improves greatly on everything we’ve seen so far — it’s dazzling. Barry Sullivan and Norma Bengell struggle to overcome the curse of a ‘demon planet’ — which rushes to possess every life form it encounters. The alien…
This little-seen Paramount war picture finishes William Holden’s run with lovely Nancy Olson as his co-star; John Farrow’s direction gets serious about a naval officers’ ‘between the wars’ troubles, and then settles on a recruiting stance for the then-hot Korean War. It’s filmed partly at sea, which adds to the realism, and it tries to…
“Only at the point of dying.” Hailed in Europe but ignored here, Sergio Leone’s most prestigious western transcends classic status. Its operatic gunfighter rituals become drama-sculptures of ‘genre destiny.’ Henry Fonda overturns his ethical, decent screen image with a supremely sadistic villain; Charles Bronson catapulted into European superstardom as this film’s ‘man with no…
Guy Trosper, Anthony Mann and John Alton’s western is shocking stuff for 1950 — Hollywood did address the historical raw deal handed Native Americans, way before the activist ’70s. Robert Taylor is a Shoshone rancher in Wyoming, who comes back from the Civil War with medals and finds that opportunists are passing laws that dispossess…
This one played like gangbusters in the theater. The only negative flak we heard came from a) people that don’t like Sandra Bullock no matter what she’s in, and b) people that violently deny the premise that space garbage poses a potential threat. The thrills in this presumed 99 & 44/100% CGI space thriller just…
Milestone films and the Criterion Collection team together for this 1964 epic, a a joint Cuban-Soviet super-travelogue celebration of the revolutionary spirit. Four vignettes from the pre-Castro years spell out the glory of anti-imperialism, using fancy visuals and gravity-defying camerawork. The cultural experiment was judged a failure and shelved for decades, until it was rediscovered…
Ignore the exploitative original posters … this thriller from 1983 is a clear-eyed view of America’s gun problem, expressed, wouldn’t you know it, by an Englishman. Filmmaker Tony Garnett formats his show like a vigilante shocker, but the real subject is a culture gone awry. Karen Young makes a star-caliber debut as a Boston schoolteacher…