Gangsters, murder, sex and intrigue on the French Riviera! René Clément’s overheated thriller touches all the bases, dropping Alain Delon’s fugitive playboy into a chateau henhouse with the seductive Lola Albright and Jane Fonda. It’s a twisted tale directed in high style, with Delon caught in a very Tight Spot but thinking he can outsmart…
Ethereal creatures walk among us! Wim Wenders’ contemplative utopia proposes other-dimensional Angels that comfort and watch over the insecure and fearful. Angel First Class Bruno Ganz envies living humans and falls in love with the aerial ballerina Solveig Dommartin. To experience life and love firsthand he opts to cast off his exalted status and become…
With a fine script, decent co-stars and sensitive direction, this fancy-dress production of the sad story of The Lady of the Camélias can boast Greta Garbo’s most accomplished romantic performance. The relative inexperience of young co-star Robert Taylor is actually a plus — it makes sense for Marguerite Gautier to be carried off in rapture…
It hasn’t much of a reputation, but James Frawley’s kooky Disaster Movie spoof may fill the need for silly comedy — it has a crazy premise, a truly ridiculous ‘star’ in its enormous atom-powered bus, and a jolly all-star crew of comedic performers: Joseph Bologna, Stockard Channing, John Beck, Rene Auberjonois, Ned Beatty, José Ferrer,…
Peter Bogdanovich’s intriguing suspense thriller is a near ‘perfect mousetrap’ of a movie that neatly sidesteps accusations of topical exploitation. Polly Platt and Samuel Fuller helped Bogdanovich concoct a low budget winner from Roger Corman’s restrictive requirements: utilize a couple of days of owed time from actor Boris Karloff and fold in stock footage from…
Fritz Lang’s wavering American career hit a high note in this adaptation of a Clifford Odets play with a four-star cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan and Marilyn Monroe, all billed above the title. It’s a tawdry love triangle in a fishing town, where infidelity brings violence to the surface. Monroe’s character — “Twenty,…
Viavision Imprint’s 4th Noir collection is here, with two core examples of the classic style, one solid gangster film, an adventure-intrigue tale set in South Africa and two psychological ‘woman in peril’ thrillers. The male leads Burt Lancaster, Alan Ladd, Humphrey Bogart and Robert Ryan must contend with heroines Corrine Calvet, Jan Sterling, Phyllis Calvert…
CineSavant takes a break to catch up with a ‘Wonder Movie of the Ages’ — from 93 years ago. Raoul Walsh led an enormous company all over the West to film an immense wagon train epic — in a short-lived 70mm film process called Grandeur. The vistas of pioneer action are staggering, and so is…
Another CineSavant Revival Screening Review, or in other words, it’s not yet officially available for English-language viewers. This French The Hunchback of Notre Dame may not be the cinematic masterpiece that is RKO’s 1939 version, but it has a literate script, good production values, color and CinemaScope — and doesn’t mar the Victor Hugo original…
🎶 “Have you heard . . . about the stars? . . . Ju-pi-ter could collide with Mars . . .” 🎶 A comet is on a collision course with Earth, a saga experienced through a TV Network, the teenager who first discovered the astral threat, and the team of astronauts dispatched on a deep…
CineSavant dips into film school heaven with Bruce Posner’s new collection of experimental art pix spanning a hundred years of cinematic impishness. The Dadaists and Cubists are here — Léger, Man Ray, Duchamp — plus camera geniuses, cinematic theorists and others wishing to make a splash in museum showings. Featured are works by Orson Welles,…
The first MGM film from the noir team of Anthony Mann / John Alton is a crime exposé of the migrant farmworker issue. Ricardo Montalban is excellent as a Mexican immigration cop, and co-star George Murphy makes a traumatic impression in one of the most sadistic scenes in classic film noir. Hardcore noir addresses a…
The Sidney Lumet classic graduates to the 4K bracket, with a new transfer. Pictures like this taught a generation of American kids that our system of justice was alive and vital — even if Reginald Rose’s tense drama suggests that twelve inconvenienced jurors can also behave like a Lynch Mob. Star Henry Fonda continued his…
Dennis Hopper’s self-indulgent romantic hit man thriller is too interested in modern art and cinematic detours to give its own storyline a fair shake. The supporting cast and celebrity walk-ons are fun; star Jodie Foster does the heavy lifting with a difficult character to play. Kino’s disc has both versions — the theatrical cut is…
Pitched somewhere between spy thrills, camp satire and art nouveau nostalgia, Basil Dearden’s assassination adventure didn’t launch a comic book fantasy phase, even if it resembles the graphic-novel thrillers that now dominate the movies. Diana Rigg and Oliver Reed do their utmost to elevate the joky script, and almost succeed . . . and plenty…
Severin’s latest deluxe collector’s box gathers a quartet of ‘Gothic holdovers,’ Italo productions that persist with spooky castles, strange noblemen and aggressively passionate leading ladies. They range from the B&W ’60s to the more permissive screens of the early ’70s, when contemporary-set Giallos took over. The group includes an oddity, a rarity and a garish…
We finally caught up with this bold yet misconceived Robert Rossen drama, a desert trek in which Army major Gary Cooper must deal with 5 mutinous Medal of Honor nominees. It’s a lengthy discourse on bravery versus cowardice, held together by the fine actors Rita Hayworth, Van Heflin, Tab Hunter and Richard Conte. A lot…
A Jean Rollin film scores a first 4K disc release before Bava, Franju or Fisher; we review the Blu-ray edition. Once again dipping into free-form softcore Ero-horror, the French filmmaker imposes his improvisatory style on a fairly conventional vampire story, embracing the lesbian trends of the day (night). Should we be surprised that Rollin is…
A gritty combat drama with Steve McQueen, James Coburn and Harry Guardino? Why wasn’t this on Blu ten years ago? Don Siegel directs an entertaining ‘infantry squad in trouble’ thriller with his expected hard-edged, unsentimental attitude. Bob Newhart excels via an audience-pleasing comic bit but Bobby Darin’s co-starring position is diminished by the aggressive McQueen….
This Ingmar Bergman masterpiece still works, and its profundity is only part of the bargain. Max von Sydow is the returning knight who discovers that ‘you can’t go home again,’ especially not when the Plague is loose. Existense is chaotic on all levels in this corner of the medieval world; our knight must play a…
Get set for another intriguing Russian import from Deaf Crocodile Films. Karen Shakhnazarov’s tale interweaves history with our essential human identity: if the truth of past events remains hidden, how can we know who we are? Star Malcolm McDowell is Timofeyev, an asylum inmate convinced that he’s killed two Tsars, at different times in history….
The four The Next Generation feature films under the Rick Berman flag maintain the character fun of the TV series while working awfully hard to deliver high-quality space opera for the 1990s. Fans get what they want, plus at times a decent sense of humor. An obvious mission was to extend the characters of Jean-Luc…
William Wyler’s breakthrough movie gives John Barrymore one of his better sound-era dramatic roles, in a strong, incisive pre-Code adapted from Elmer Rice’s play set in a high-powered New York Law office. Attorney George Simon has done well by defending the rich, and eases his conscience by helping people from his roots down on Second…
One of the last of the classic Weimar silents, Joe May’s melodrama is only partly expressionist; Günther Rittau’s terrific camerawork tells a ‘street’ story of crime and sex with minimal dialogue. Gustav Fröhlich is the green Berlin street cop and Betty Amman the vamp who sullies his badge; the story takes place in 24 hours…
Something of a missing link in the filmography of Marlene Dietrich, this immediate postwar French production pairs her with one of her great amours, Jean Gabin. Almost forgotten now, it has qualities other Dietrich films don’t, starting with her taking a character role rather than one that plays off her glamorous silver screen image. It’s…
Daniel Petrie and Ellen Burstyn’s excellent film elevates a genre we normally disdain — the Ethereal Cereal do-you-believe Spiritual Awakening picture. Call this one intelligent, thoughtful, insightful, respectful and emotionally extra-effective. It pushes all the right buttons and finds a conclusion that doesn’t make us roll our eyes. Burstyn’s commitment, Petrie’s direction and the input…