Smart Words About Cinema
Army of Crime (Kino Lorber) Don’t let the title throw you. The heroes of Robert Guédiguian’s based-on-a-true-story French war drama are not The Dirty Dozen unleashed on the Nazis but a remarkably effective resistance cell formed of French Jews, communists and immigrants—the very “undesirables” targeted by the Nazis for the camps. Guédiguian’s previous films—at least [...]
The Red Shoes (Criterion) There’s a real charge to the cinema of Michael Powell, a joy in the play of expressionist possibilities of the medium, that lights up his films with energy, color, and magic—the magic of love and life and art. That invention and play with cinematic technique sounds like another British director with [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980] I’ve never had the opportunity to see Allan Arkush and Joe Dante’s Hollywood Boulevard; on the other hand, I suspect that I saw a fair portion of it in Roger Corman: Hollywood’s Wild Angel, Christian Blackwood’s genial film dossier on Roger Corman, whose New World Pictures released [...]