Senso with Alida Valli and Farley Granger. Critical consensus regards Luchino Visconti’s Senso as a radical departure, a sign of the director’s shift in focus from the gritty world of downtrodden…
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The Girl. In rural Sweden, a young girl’s parents jet off to Africa on a charity trip, leaving the child (Blanca Engström) in the care of an inattentive aunt. The…
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Riot movie with Jim Brown and Gene Hackman. “A protest, a riot, I don’t care what you call it,” says Red (Gene Hackman), the mastermind of an audacious plan to…
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Paul Winfield, the canine Sounder, Kevin Hooks, Sounder Sounder probably features more extremely wide shots than any movie besides Lawrence of Arabia – and Martin Ritt’s movie is only half…
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Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence with 1970s pop icon David Bowie. He stands in the courtroom, fully inhabiting his allotted space behind the bar, clad in fatigues and a rakish scarf,…
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Hardware with Dylan McDermott and Stacey Travis. What did you get your sweetie for Christmas? Mo (Dylan McDermott), a Marine just barely scratching a living out of the post-nuke wasteland…
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Black Rain. Animego’s DVD release of Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain includes as a bonus feature a selection of World War II-era anti-Japanese propaganda films. Sponsored by various U.S. government bureaucracies,…
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Esther Williams: Swimsuit Star on TCM DVD box set featuring culturally and sociologically curious aquamusicals Million Dollar Mermaid + Easy to Love.
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Boris Karloff & Bela Lugosi horror classics “With a few exceptions,” wrote Andrew Sarris in You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, “The Bride of Frankenstein represented the last gasp of the…
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Michiyo Aratama, Tatsuya Nakadai in The Human Condition Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition, based on Jumpei Gomikawa’s novel, is probably as well known for its scope and scale as for…
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Made in USA: Jean-Luc Godard effort stars Anna Karina. When the young cinephiles who would later spawn the French New Wave attended screenings of Hollywood films at the Cinémathèque Française…
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Griffith Movies: Mandatory Viewing + Excellent Carol Dempster and the American Kay Hammond while Orson Welles remembers W.C. Fields.
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Griffith Cinema: Abraham Lincoln Biopic and the dangers of alcoholism + climactic ice-floe river rescue honoring father of American film.
René Navarre as Fantômas True cinephiles know what to say when asked to explain the relative aggregate crumminess of the films they’ve bothered to see in 2010: “Too many lousy…
Death in the Garden with Simone Signoret and Georges Marchal. I hadn’t even heard of Death in the Garden before its recent DVD release on the Microcinema label. It ranks…
The Tiger’s Tail with Brendan Gleeson and Kim Cattrall. One might initially be surprised to find that John Boorman’s latest film, The Tiger’s Tail, has all but gone straight to…