CineSavant
Morituri
Marlon Brando had few if any hits in the 1960s, but this wartime spy picture is a not-bad thriller with some tense…
Articles by Glenn Erickson
CineSavant
The Golden Arrow
It's Tab Hunter as you've never seen him before! Antonio Margheriti's limp but colorful Arabian Nights adventure romance is a real head-scratcher…
CineSavant
War and Peace (1966)
Amazing! Colossal! And it's good, too! 'Gone With the Wind' is a tempest in a teacup compared to this jaw-dropping adaptation of…
CineSavant
The Silent Partner
The absolute best small scale 'perfect crime' thriller has nail-biting suspense, humor, sexy scenes, a shocking violent scene and apparently a terrific…
CineSavant
Cinderella
After five years of combining animated short subjects, and a combo live-action/animation feature, Disney dove into full feature animation fantasy again with…
CineSavant
The Running Man (1963)
Sir Carol Reed takes on a movie about insurance fraud in sunny Spain -- with a great trio of actors for 1963.…
CineSavant
The Bostonians
Henry James novels have made terrific movies; this precise, strongly-felt adaptation expresses interior feelings that James -- the master of ambiguity --…
CineSavant
A Patch of Blue
Sidney Poitier's films of the 1950s and '60s almost always put a statement about race in the forefront, and even when the…
CineSavant
Earthquake
1974 was ground zero for a 7.0 magnitude shaker on the clumsy, kitschy disaster-movie Richter Scale with Universal's ambitious, tossed-together epic of…
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…
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…