Nancy Savoca belongs in the top rank of creative filmmakers of the 1990s. This unorthodox telling of a ‘neighborhood miracle’ may be her most ambitious and original work. TV comedienne Tracey Ullman surprised everyone with her unusual characterization, but Lili Taylor stole the show with the most compelling depiction ever of someone enraptured by faith…
Family-friendly Steven Spielberg once again seeks out the sentimental corner of sci-fi, with memorable roles for his lovable cast and a technical workout for his visual effects experts. Cute flying saucers behave like storybook elves, to make magic for elderly evictees (Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy). The writers in this refreshingly warm-hearted show would later specialize…
This Poverty Row PRC opus was thrown together in just a few weeks, in the first months of World War II. Cult actress Anna May Wong gets top billing in a pro-China thriller about keeping the Burma Road open, an issue that would later become a real wartime strategy. We’re also drawn to anything by…
Swing back with us to 1958, when all three TV networks were crammed with westerns, each of which needed a gimmick. Wayde Preston IS Chris Colt, a secret agent who takes on various bad guys every week, pretending to be an ordinary traveling gun salesman. The three seasons are jammed with favorite actors and actresses…
It’s what a real movie marquee might have offered in the second half of the 1920s. Disc producers Jon C. Mirsalis and Ben Model give us four ‘rescued’ attractions, which include a western, a soap opera, a zany comedy with bathing beauties, and a jungle adventure featuring a woman raised by a gorilla. Each was…
John Ford’s outlaw trio rescues an orphaned baby, evoking the sentimental innocence of silent-era westerns. With John Wayne, Ward Bond and Pedro Armendáriz on board, and photographed in blazing Technicolor by Winton Hoch, little else is needed to wow Ford fans. Plus hymns, home cooking, genuine Death Valley locations and a Christmas miracle. It’s a…
Pegged as a slasher-type horror, Simon Wincer’s drama hews closer to the emerging ‘artful’ trend in Australian filmmaking — with some of the bigger names associated with fancier exploitation fare, too: Everett De Roche, Brian May. Chantal Contouri gets top billing but the film is carried away by the magnetic Sigrid Thornton, who would later…
Warners star power triumphs in a patched-together screen classic about the hard life of truckers on the road — that turns into a murder ‘n’ madness melodrama. It’s a special picture in terms of career advancement for Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. The somewhat sexist dialogue feels edgy for 1940, and Ann Sheridan is at…
It was slick, glamorous, sexy — the cable series tickled TV viewers with fantasies of Wall Street wealth and power, adding extra fun with a gate-crashing imposter and his photographic memory. This is how the one percenters wished they lived: beautiful people in killer fashions, in a law firm that settles most disputes out of…
Directed by Peter Yates and performed with great finesse by Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, Ronald Harwood’s adaptation of his own play is great entertainment. Touring the provinces in wartime, an eccentric Shakespearian legend is falling apart in mind and body; only the star’s dedicated, put-upon dresser can get him into a mental shape allowing…
This import shows what’s uniquely terrific about a Home Video disc done well — the combined audio commentaries tell us so much I didn’t know about a movie we thought we knew well. Sidestepping some of the conventions of its time, Joshua Logan’s movie is almost unique in the way it speaks truth to official…
The celebrated filmic designer Saul Bass took on a tall cinematic challenge, directing a cerebral sci-fi thriller designed to rely heavily on his graphic communication technique. He lost the faith of a studio along the way, and perhaps his own sense of ‘directorial imperative.’ What’s left of his unique, post-2001 mindblower barely holds together, even…
Now available in a domestic Blu-ray — if The Phone Company doesn’t suppress it — is one of the smartest, funniest political satires ever, and James Coburn’s finest hour as an actor & project-chooser. Writer-director Theodore J. Flicker’s movie transcends the spy-craze politics of 1967: the White House shrink knows too many Presidential secrets, making…
It’s an ‘alternate future’ time warp tale of the kind that seldom works … but this is an exception. Andrew Legge’s modest found-footage movie serves up a rich dose of sci-fi ideas. What would you do if you could listen in on radio and TV signals from the future? In 1940, two women use their…
Film Noir the Dark Side of Cinema XVII 17th time is charmed! Kino’s long running noir series hits a winner: all three pictures are strict-definition noirs and two of them haven’t been easy to see on video. The set is also an Edward G. Robinson festival, charting three years when the grey-listed star was taking…
William Dieterle’s film of Stephen Vincent Benét’s Faust-like folk tale is both traditional and experimental, part of a brief wave of ambitious, artistic RKO filmmaking. The agrarian horror-show pits an American statesman against what may be the screen’s best-ever Satan, a rustic tempter of farmers facing hard times. The cast is sensational: Edward Arnold, Walter…
Leave it to MGM to begin its dark Depression-Era pre-Code drama amid the top hat, silk gown & marble hall crowd. Talulah Bankhead is the wild heiress who loses her millions and then her self-respect; handsome Robert Montgomery is the pink-slipped ad man injured while driving a truck as a scab. Notorious stage personality Bankhead…
It’s vintage, it’s trashy, it’s Italian. Bellissima! A vampire prowls in a castle, but all emphasis goes to cheesecake coverage of the five sexy showgirls he wants to bite, one of whom is the reincarnation of his original victim. By modern terms the ‘just for adults’ horror content is tame, a little silly, maybe endearing….
Kino reissues Sergio Leone’s least loved epic, a movie he didn’t want to direct but also the one with the most ambitious theme. A murderous Irish rebel tricks a vulgar Mexican bandit into joining a revolution, and they have a rough time dealing with an occupying army that favors massacres of civilians. James Coburn’s dynamiter…
This dramatic masterpiece is perhaps the most accurate and compelling account of American racism in the 1960s, despite being made by two Jewish filmmakers from New York. Filming at the height of the Civil Rights movement, Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young stick to a personal story and refrain from viewing the black experience through…
John Wayne’s final movie is a somber, blood-soaked farewell trimmed with sentimental guest-star cameos and closing-the-book gestures. Wayne is terrific as the gunfighter-at-sunset; Lauren Bacall makes the best impression amid a gallery of old friends that includes James Stewart. Audiences didn’t know what to make of the gory final gunfight … was Wayne giving in…
Hiding in a box marked Noir is one of Universal’s horror-adjacent ’40s mystery thrillers, in a terrific new transfer. The talky adaptation retains some of Edgar Allan Poe’s complicated detective ratiocinations, and spices things up with personalities like prickly Maria Ouspenskaya and star-to-be Maria Montez. Paul Dupin must juggle a mysterious disappearance, plus mutilation murders…
All failed revolutionaries take heart: the Taviani brothers’ downbeat yet creatively magical story of the wrong rebels in the wrong insurrection at the wrong time features a disillusioned fighter-of-the-good-fight determined to betray his comrades and abscond with their money. The three women that support and/or double-cross him are Laura Betti, Lea Massari and Mimsy Farmer….
Warren Beatty and Julie Christie help Robert Altman fashion one of his best pictures, a story of the Building of the West that meanders off in its own revisionist direction. The West, sayeth Altman, is just the evils of the East transplanted into the wilderness, a massive property grab. The free-form direction and cluttered soundtrack…
If any motion picture can still be called important, this one qualifies. Scott Z. Burns and Steve Soderbergh’s superb ‘extrapolated’ pandemic thriller imagines a virus that spreads like wildfire and kills in 48 hours. Well-cast stars fill a variety of crucial roles: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Marion Cotilliard, Kate Winslet, Jennifer…
It’s a micro-scaled domestic noir: Loretta Young’s frantic housewife is tormented by a deranged husband, an invalid gone paranoid and determined to frame her for murder. Tay Garnett directs to spotlight Young’s increasing distress, with Barry Sullivan providing the psychotic menace. As a ‘woman alone’ picture it’s not bad — in Young’s frenzied state, even…