Smart Words About Cinema
Contributor
If you want to just say Moe to the week’s wide releases (including the Farrelly Bros. attempt to recreate The Three Stooges with new actors in the iconic roles), here are some of the options outside (and, in come cases, inside) the multiplexes. This is Not a Film is a protest of great power, right down [...]
Ray Milland earned an Oscar playing an alcoholic desperately seeking a drink while facing a very bad night of the DTs in Billy Wilder’s 1945 The Lost Weekend, one of the first Hollywood films to seriously confront alcoholism as a disease. George Stevens’ 1952 Something to Live For is in no way a sequel but The Lost Weekend can’t help [...]
Screaming Mimi (Sony Pictures Choice Collection), directed by Gerd Oswald from a novel by Fredric Brown, is a real cult item in the film noir filmography, weird and lurid and kitschy, but fascinating all the same. Anita Ekberg stars as Yolanda, an exotic nightclub dancer who survives an attack from a serial killer and becomes much [...]
Not up for the American Reunion of the Pie-pals of the sex-comedy series? There’s plenty of alternatives arriving this week, including Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s mesmerizing Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Joseph Cedar’s Oscar-nominated Footnote from Israel, and revivals of the classics Laura and North by Northwest. “The best films I saw during my week [...]
Chinatown is an American masterpiece, a great film released in a year full of great films. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, but in the face of “The Godfather Part II” (among others), it won only a single Oscar: Best Original Screenplay by Robert Towne. It is a magnificent original script, a great American novel [...]
La Visita/The Visitor (Raro Video) Pina (Sandra Milo) is a lonely beauty in a small Italian town in the north, a successful and confident professional with her own business and a lovely home she shares with a pet dog, parrot, and turtle. Adolfo (François Périer) is a bookseller in Rome who answers her personal ad. As [...]
Hulu, the streaming movies and TV service, has an exclusive deal for the Criterion catalogue, a collection that also features a number of titles that Criterion has yet to release on DVD. This week, for a limited time, Hulu is making a small selection of “Midnight Movies,” cult films, and rarities available to stream for free, [...]
A Joe Dante cinema inferno, a night silent shorts with original music and live entertainment, and festivals of Cary Grant movies, British noir, and classic Bollywood musicals all compete for your attention this week. And that doesn’t even take into account the theatrical debuts of Cannes Film Festival award winner The Kid on a Bike and [...]
Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (Anchor Bay) profiles Roger Corman, the legendary director and producer who helped launch the careers of some of the greatest actors and filmmakers of the last five decades. Alex Stapleton’s documentary is an entertaining, zippy tour through his career, framed with behind-the-scenes footage from the production of Dinoshark, one of [...]
The 1960s was filled with films featuring swinging single men (or even, God forbid, cheating married men), most of them between 30 and 50 living in lavish bachelor pads with fully stocked bars and a revolving door of younger women passing through to their bedrooms:Boeing, Boeing, A Guide For the Married Man, What’s New Pussycat, How to Save [...]
Young, Violent, Dangerous opens with on a warning. Lea (Eleonora Giorgi, of Dario Argento’s Inferno), worried for her rather weak boyfriend, wants the police commissioner (Italian crime movie stalwart Tomas Milian, in cool seventies badass mode) to stop these otherwise “good boys” from embarking in an impulsive gas station robbery. Cut to three smiling, fun-loving young men [...]
You might assume that since The Hunger Games is opening on over 4,000 screens across the country that it’s the only film around, but that’s not quite true. There is Salmon Fishing in Yemen from Lasse Halstrom and Boy from New Zealand and the final weekend of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival at The Uptown. [...]
If all you know of Abel Gance’s 1927 masterpiece Napoleon is the version presented by Francis Ford Coppola in the U.S. in 1983 (and subsequently released on VHS tape and laserdisc), you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. Coppola invited his father, Carmine Coppola, to compose an original score for the American release, which was cut down [...]
On Sunday, October 20, 2001, on the final day of the 20th Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (the greatest, grandest silent film festival in the known universe), I boarded a vintage steam engine with a few hundred other silent movie-loving patrons, traveled from Sacile to Udine, filed into the Udine Opera House, took my nearly-front row [...]
In advance of the American premiere of the fully restored edition of Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon in Oakland on March 24, Turner Classic Movies presents two of the auteur’s earlier films: J’Accuse (1919), which appropriates the cry leveled by Emile Zola during the Dreyfus affair to decry the horrors of World War I, and La [...]