Smart Words About Cinema
Who would have predicted that Midnight in Paris (Sony) would become Woody Allen’s most financially successful film ever? On the one hand, the wish fulfillment fantasy of an American screenwriter (Owen Wilson) on a Paris vacation who is whisked back in time and welcomed into the company of the Lost Generation artists of the twenties, [...]
Pier Paolo Pasolini directs Maria Callas in his 1969 interpretation of the ancient Euripides play, a tragic myth turned Greek tragedy that he stages in a stripped down, almost abstracted collision of the primitive and modern cultures in an ancient land. Pasolini strips the play down to symbolic, almost abstract expressions of scenes and ideas, [...]
The French crime thriller Point Blank(Magnolia), not to be confused with John Boorman’s 1967 post-noir masterpiece, opens in full sprint and pretty much stays in that adrenaline-pumping state. Sure, we get a peaceful interlude with nursing student Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) and his pregnant wife (Elena Anaya of The Skin I Live In) to show just [...]
John Barrymore’s 1922 Sherlock Holmes was not the first screen incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, the most well-known fictional character in English literature, and certainly not the definitive. This production, directed by Albert Parker as a mix of dime novel adventure and pulp crime thriller, is ostensibly based on Doyle’s stories but more directly on the [...]
Eugenio Martino’s Horror Express (Severin) is a one of those odd duck films: a Spanish horror for an international audience with Hammer stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and American actor Telly Savalas (something of an international character actor icon of the time thanks to such films as The Dirty Dozen, On Her Majesty’s Secret [...]
The three colors are blue, white and red. They are the colors of the French flag, of course, and they are appropriated by director Krzysztof Kieslowski along with the themes of the motto they more or less represent: liberty, equality, fraternity. But the films Blue (1993), White (1993) and Red (1994) are not hymns to [...]
The Rules of the Game (1939), the last film Jean Renoir made in France before fleeing the Nazi invasion for the United States and Hollywood, is at once savage social satire and a compassionate comedy of manners with a sour undercurrent. Both shot and set in the dying days of the 1930s, as the Third [...]
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1982 Identification of a Woman was a homecoming of sorts for the legendary Italian director, who (the studio-bound, shot-on-video experiment The Mystery of Oberwald aside) hadn’t made a feature in his home country since the 1964 The Red Desert. Back with screenwriter Tonino Guerra and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, it’s also a return [...]
Blue Velvet debuts on Blu-ray from MGM this week with a newly remastered edition of the film, but it also features a unique peak into the creative process of Lynch with a collection of recently rediscovered deleted scenes: 50 minutes of visions, both lovely and horrible, human and hellish. These pieces were pared away in [...]
The original French title of Going Places is Les valseuses, French slang for “The Testicles” (“The Nuts” would be its English counterpart). That’s a pretty accurate description of Bertrand Blier’s characters, a pair of aimless, amoral twenty-something buddies bouncing (or escaping) from one situation to another, all instigated by their own mix of childlike bad [...]
Lon Chaney became a star for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) but it was the 1925 Phantom of the Opera (Image) that confirmed his stardom and his talent. The first version of many versions of the Gaston Leroux novel is still considered the definitive, thanks to Chaney’s committed performance (right down to enduring painful [...]
Sergio Martino’s Torso opens by ogling naked flesh. A couple of anonymous models writhe around while a photographer (face unseen, only a camera in close-up) snaps away softcore shot, interrupted by shards of flashbacks involving a child’s doll, not exactly threatening but still a bit weird. Which pretty much us gives all the building blocks [...]
Elio Petri’s mod twist on “The Most Dangerous Game” as social bloodsport is the original Survivor, where the bored, the ambitious, and the just plain violent can sign up for a deadly game of cat and mouse with fatal consequences. Based on Robert Sheckley’s short story “The Seventh Victim” (the script upped the body count), [...]
Whoever dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve is doomed to drive Death’s carriage for the next year, collecting the souls that pass on and carrying them to the afterlife. This bit of folklore is the narrative conceit on which The Phantom Carriage rests. It opens as a supernatural tale — part [...]
[Expanded from a feature originally published in 1997 in Seattle Weekly] “Amateurs borrow, professionals steal,” goes the maxim. Quentin Tarantino steals like a pro. Where directors of the previous generation peppered their films with classic cinematic quotes, Tarantino plunders the films of his formative years for ideas – mostly B-movies and exploitation films about cars [...]