CineSavant
Warlock (1959)
As the first wave of 'adult' westerns began to fade, 1959 gave us a burst of genuinely adult stories about the famed…
Articles by Glenn Erickson
CineSavant
The Snake Pit
Hollywood takes a hard look at the mundane horrors of mental asylums, and Olivia de Havilland scores another career high with her…
CineSavant
The Day Time Ended
Long AWOL from Home Video -- the last time I peeked it was an unwatchable pan-and-scanned laserdisc -- this early Charles Band…
CineSavant
The Andromeda Strain
Jumpin' gingivitis! Vicious microbes from space threaten the world and our only hope is a team of scientists in an underground lab…
CineSavant
Police Story & Police Story 2
All the world loves Jackie Chan, whose cinematic action pictures bridge the gap between silent-era virtuosity and slick modernity. As light comedy…
CineSavant
Ring of Bright Water
This favorite animal film takes a half-step sideways out of the cute animal subgenre: the delightful Mij is no super-otter, just an…
CineSavant
Stagecoach (1966)
Twilight Time goes for a Blu-ray upgrade of the western remake with the all-star cast. Forget that there was ever a John…
CineSavant
Men Must Fight
CineSavant obsesses over yet another obscure bit of cinematic sociology: a glossy pre-Code MGM melodrama about mothers and war, which half-debates issues…
CineSavant
Von Richthofen and Brown
Freshly divorced from American-International Pictures, Roger Corman leaps into the filmic mainstream with a fairly large-scale World War One aviation picture. He…
CineSavant
The Landlord
It's the brightest debut feature of 1970, and perhaps the warmest movie ever about the American race divide. Hal Ashby and Bill…
CineSavant
The Big Clock
Clever plotting goes into overdrive for this light-comedy proto-paranoid film noir about a magazine publishing empire so organized that it seems a…
CineSavant
Robbery
Why do crime caper films have so much appeal? Are we all closet criminals, eager to watch less timid souls risk life…
CineSavant
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
"You crazy rat you croaked him!" Yes, you've probably heard better hardboiled dialogue, but this British imitation of American gangster pictures takes…
CineSavant
The Mysterious Island (1929)
MGM's gigantic silent sci-fi extravaganza took three years to make, by which time the talkies arrived and everything went to pieces. Lionel…
CineSavant
Summer Stock
I don't know if Garland fans still go around chanting 'Judy Judy Judy' at her every appearance, but they do have a…
CineSavant
Highway Patrolman (El Patrullero)
The prize for best direction of 1991 ought to have gone to Alex Cox, whose visual economy in this show is to…
CineSavant
My Brilliant Career
Gill(ian) Armstrong's breakthrough feature does a leapfrog over stories like Little Women, with heroines that prevail even when adhering to the Meek…
CineSavant
Lilith
There's no movie quite like Robert Rossen's adaptation of the J.R. Salamanca book: mental illness and disturbance is neither simplified nor jammed…
CineSavant
Three Coins in the Fountain
Ah, yes -- it's a hot day in 1954, so what could be better than a cool movie theater projecting beautiful Italian…
CineSavant
Melvin and Howard
What does the American dream mean to you? Hardworking folk just want the job and the house and the family as promised…
CineSavant
The Land Unknown
"Behind A Barrier Of Antarctic Ice...A Paradise Of Hidden Terrors!" Universal-International laid out a pretty penny to film this elaborate spin on…
CineSavant
The Prisoner
Alec Guinness transfers an acting challenge from the stage to the screen, in this account of a Cardinal forced to knuckle under…
CineSavant
The Heiress
William Wyler and a trio of fantastic actors make indelible movie history from a grim story by Henry James. How much of…
CineSavant
A Face in the Crowd
Elia Kazan never stopped making great pictures, but much of his output after 1952 was politically defensive in nature. This powerful indictment…
CineSavant
Tarantula
A plug for commercial exterminators everywhere, William Alland's titanic hairy spider provided plenty of chills for 1950s drive-ins, delivering exactly the naïve…
CineSavant
The Reckless Moment
One of Max Ophüls' best American movies is this razor-sharp 'domestic film noir' with excellent acting and a premise that was probably…