Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week we pair wines with movies featuring that iconic thing that goes on forever. The Road, and those who love it, travel it, live it. Freeway, from 1996, is a dark…
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…
It’s all about James Cagney — his every expression commands our attention. Writer Mark Hellinger recaps a decade of gangster tropes in a Cliff’s Notes tour through the underworld racketeering of the Prohibition years. The message is that Crime Does Not Pay, yet audiences love Cagney’s reluctant mobster, carefully adjusted to sidestep Production Code no-nos….
Now it can be told — even if it’s total fiction! James Cagney takes his rough & tumble ways to Tokyo to scoop the existence of a world domination conspiracy 11 years before Pearl Harbor! It’s The Front Page meets Yojimbo circa 1945, except that Cagney’s scenarists have Tokyo militarists behaving like Chicago mobsters. Yes,…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week we celebrate the fact that Sir Sidney Poitier walked the earth with us regular humans for 94 years. His birthday of February 20th is a great reason to pair wines…
Aka Roter Himmel. Christian Petzold’s movie wields a big impact on a deceptively modest scale. The problems of a young man sharing a summer house form a self-contained meditation on How To Live. Thomas Schubert’s Leon is an insufferable jerk who can’t understand why he feels so alienated from others. One of his tolerant housemates…
What is worse, a demon from hell or academic politics? One destroys your soul with unimaginable horror, and the other involves the supernatural. A duel of diabolists is underway at a small English college: Janet Blair’s spell-casting faculty wife employs charms and tokens to promote her reluctant professor husband, Peter Wyngarde, but the battle becomes…
Faith-based madness! This 1952 sci-fi thriller is not a space opera, but a talky propaganda sermon. Peter Graves and Andrea King exchange radio messages with God, who lives on Mars, and a Nazi madman is eavesdropping on them. The show predicts that a Christian revolution will destroy Godless Communism, and advocates the replacement of our…
Big stars, big action and a big sky canvas give Hal Wallis’ super-western everything we love in vintage oaters. Burt Lancaster & Kirk Douglas compare testosterone levels, with Rhonda Fleming and Jo Van Fleet cheering from the sidelines. The fabled showdown gun-down is embellished with VistaVision, Technicolor, and a classic clippety-clop soundtrack by Dimitri Tiomkin,…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week we pair wines with three creature features, the stuff we stayed up late to watch on Friday nights. Maybe we still do. Oh joy! Three monster movies are on the…
This near-perfect Errol Flynn movie became a timeless classic the moment it hit television. The story of boxer Jim Corbett stands as a prime example of studio-based filmmking that knows what the audience likes. It’s so good we don’t mind the thick Irish humor, and we’re forced to shed a tear for Ward Bond, too….
Neo-noir hit big in this breakthrough thriller from the Coen Bros., with a new kind of hardboiled rural naturalism. A lonely dive bar, a rotten marriage and a three-way murder & blackmail scheme criss-cross a quartet of unforgettable characterizations. The festival independent launched the star career of Frances McDormand, but also did great things for…
What’s the Czech word for eccentric? Oldrich Lipský’s comic fantasy ribs 1890s thriller conventions in a story that combines gothic romance, sci-fi marvels and serial thrills. Welcome to the weird world of Czech filmmakers, and their affection for silly characters, low comedy and operatic delirium. We aren’t surprised that it was never imported . ….
The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming Blu-ray Kino Lorber 1966 / 2:35.1 / 126 Min. Starring Alan Arkin, Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint Written by William Rose Photographed by Joseph Biroc Directed by Norman Jewison Cape Cod can’t catch a break, before there were sharks, there were Russians. Though the Russians were considerably…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week we put on the headphones/earbuds and let the music wash over us. Are we high? If not, we have some wine pairings to go along with the musical movies. This…
The little studio Eagle-Lion Films was at the forefront of noir violence in 1948, skating on the edge to tell the story of a particularly vicious real-life bandit. Richard Basehart excels as the trigger-happy psycho killer whose antisocial estrangement evokes an eerie noir vibe of existential amorality. The filmic approach pioneers the semi-docu style that…
Michael Cimino must have impressed Clint Eastwood — the screenplay for this tough guy crime caper was so good, Eastwood didn’t mind interrupting his progress as a director. Also great fun for Jeff Bridges fans, the show is writer-director Cimino’s least problematic picture — its only aim is non-stop action and agreeably vulgar comedy. And…
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Criterion 2022 / 1:85.1 Starring Ewan McGregor, Gregory Mann, and David Bradley Written by Guillermo del Toro and Patrick McHale Photographed by Frank Passingham Directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson “It’s alive!” cried the alchemist when he saw his creation move for the first…
We kids ogled the ’60s pocketbook covers that promised forbidden adult content, but a full-blown sword & sorcery Conan film adaptation wouldn’t come along for twenty years. Dino De Laurentiis’ second stab at a Star Wars– style franchise hit paydirt: body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger became a bona fide star as the Cimmerian swordsman, ‘fleshing out’…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week we examine three films dealing with the downside of being a fine artiste. The 1986 biodrama, Caravaggio, is an interpretive account of the life, and death, of Italian artist Michelangelo…
The Prince and the Pauper Blu-ray Warner Archive 1937 / 1:33.1 Starring Billy and Bobby Mauch, Errol Flynn, Claude Rains Written by Laird Doyle, Catherine Chisholm Cushing Photographed by Sol Polito Directed by William Keighley Errol Flynn is featured prominently on the poster but he doesn’t arrive till the 53 minute mark of 1937’s The…
This isn’t a new disc; you might not even be able to find a copy. We’re reposting a 2015 review because its original page was taken down. Samuel Fuller’s Japan-filmed thriller is a fanciful vision of Yankee crooks functioning on the streets of Tokyo. As pulp fiction it can’t be beat — Robert Stack is…
The homicide detective in Pietro Germi’s classic thriller knows the score: “A crime investigation is like when you lift a stone and find worms underneath.” The murder of a beautiful woman coincides with an unsolved burglary, and every inquiry reveals another layer of sordid wrongdoing, criminal and moral. Germi plays the lead as an exemplar…
Jean-Louis Trintignant’s reluctant gambler and Roy Scheider’s professional hit man shoot it out in the streets of Los Angeles in Jacques Deray’s loopy crime-time travelogue from sunny 1971. Ann-Margret and Angie Dickinson join some old noir favorites and Georgia Engel — yes, that Gloria Engel — for a mob double cross that pits an amateur…