Smart Words About Cinema
Never, ever dismiss a grassroots movement (just ask Elizabeth Warren). Or the indignation of film critics, denied the chance to see what one of their clan has called “One of the year’s, even the decade’s, cinematic wonders.” The result has been a flurry of petitions, blog-wails and unkind aspersions directed at Fox Seachlight, from here [...]
“The Woman in Black” has scared the bejesus out of audiences since first materializing in Susan Hill’s 1983 faux-gothic novel. Subsequently, this Victorian ghost story’s been adapted for British radio and television, and even for the stage. (The play opened in 1989 and is still selling tickets — the second-longest run in London history.) Now [...]
Hitchcock / Selznick: Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound (MGM) Hindsight is 20/20, but teaming of British perfectionist director Alfred Hitchcock and American iconoclast producer David O. Selznick was doomed to conflict. Selznick, who brought Hitchcock to Hollywood with an exclusive contract, was a director in all but name. He micromanaged his pictures down to the shot, rewriting [...]
There was no director like Jean Rollin, the French horror fantasist who died in 2010 and left behind a strange and wonderful (and sometimes horrible) legacy in his distinctive films. His reputation never really extended beyond cult circles but the weird sensibility and distinctive style and imagery of his sex-and-horror exploitation films, and his ability [...]
Asger Leth made his directorial bones with Ghosts of Cité Soleil, a hard-hitting documentary about the crime-ridden slums of Haiti’s Port-au-Prince, advertised as the most dangerous place on Earth. The multi-talented Leth also wrote, photographed and provided production design for “Ghosts,” which garnered good notices for visceral immediacy, as well as some critical cavils about [...]
On Monday, January 23, Turner Classic Movies is showing all four films made by Max Ophuls, the great German director, during his brief tenure in America (when he dropped the “h” and signed his films “Max Opuls”). The evening of “Max Ophuls in Hollywood” is followed by two of his greatest French films, La Ronde [...]
Cornel Wilde’s grim, fatalistic end-of-the-world thriller No Blade of Grass is a forgotten dystopian classic of its time. Gritty and brutal, built on fears of ecological devastation through pollution and overcrowding (with hints of genetic manipulation gone bad), this 1970 eco-apocalypse thriller seems to have gotten lost in the overcrowded apocalypse now science fiction cinema [...]
First-time director Ralph Fiennes brings one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known tragic heroes to ferocious life in Coriolanus, played in modern dress but voiced in the bard’s eloquently corrosive language. Fiennes acted this anti-social über-soldier, based on a legendary Roman general, on the London stage in 2000 and came to believe that Coriolanus’ rise and fall might [...]
Il Cappotto / The Overcoat (Raro) Italian director Alberto Lattuada adapts and expands Nikolai Gogol’s short story about a mousy clerk who gets a newfound respect when he purchases a handsome new overcoat in this little-seen classic from 1952 Italy. Overshadowed by the neo-realist films of the day, the satirical, smartly-made “The Overcoat” is just [...]
If you think Top Ten film lists are arbitrary, try putting together a “best of” for DVD and Blu-ray. What’s the criteria? The best movies? Quality of video and audio mastering? Creative featurettes and archival supplements? Historical importance? Cult interest? Or some balance of all these? I’m all for the balance, which makes it as [...]
The Andy Hardy Collection: Volume 1 (Warner Archive) The Andy Hardy films are a snapshot of Hollywood’s idea of small town Americana, circa 1936-1944. Simple, familiar, full of family values and homespun wisdom handed down by the thoughtful, white-haired patriarch (who just happens to be the local judge), these films defined MGM head Louis B. [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976] Attention to detail is of the essence in a fantasy film. If fantasy is to have the desired effect, everything hinges on the viewer’s willingness to suspend disbelief and submit to the film’s premises wherever they may take him. But if every shot, every moment, every idea [...]
Few directors possess Steven Spielberg’s gift for imagining movie worlds with such dynamism and exhilarating cinematic precision. His Dickensian taste for tales of abandonment and reunion speaks to the lost child in all of us, defining the primal desire for home, in boy or man, alien or artificial intelligence, war or peace. But in some [...]
Margin Call (Lionsgate) accomplishes something that Oliver Stone failed to show in his “Wall Street” sequel: it explains how and why the market crash happened, not just in terms of economics but in the culture of Wall Street and the justifications that individuals tell themselves in order to follow the company line. Written and directed [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976] The Big Bus is no movie to slap down first-run admission prices for, but if it turns up on a double bill with another halfway-enticing film, plan to give it a chance. I’d like to pretend it’s a better movie than it is, because most of the [...]