The Abyss film with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The Abyss, the costly, special-effect-laden, deep-sea adventure drama about underwater aliens and a bickering married couple, will be screened at a special 20th…
Synopsis: West Texas, 1980: A hunter (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon numerous dead bodies, a stash of heroin, and $2 million in cash lying about in the region’s arid wasteland near…
Hypnosis and crime: Michael Redgrave and Joan Bennett in Secret Beyond the Door. April 4 update: Tonight at 7:30 p.m. at UCLA’s Festival of Preservation you’ll be able to catch…
Writer, director, actor, and producer Carl Reiner, among whose feature-film credits are the George Burns hit Oh God! (1977) and several Steve Martin vehicles, is the subject of a mini-retrospective…
Detour with femme fatale Ann Savage and Tom Neal. Ann Savage’s film career was all but over by the early 1950s, and so was that of her Detour leading man…
Before the Fall movie. F. Javier Gutiérrez’s 3 Días / Before the Fall, the filmmaker’s feature-film debut (co-produced by Antonio Banderas), has an unlikely premise: as a giant meteorite is…
This Woman Is Dangerous with Joan Crawford, David Brian, and Mari Aldon. Despite the fact that it has one of my favorite movie titles, the first time I saw This…
Man of a Thousand Faces Lon Chaney delivers another phenomenally creepy portrayal in Wallace Worsley’s top-notch revenge thriller The Penalty.
Strait-Jacket with Joan Crawford. Strait-Jacket: Joan Crawford axe-murderer movie review “From the director of Homicidal, the author of Psycho, and the co-star of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane” reads…
The Naked Kiss 1964 with Constance Towers. In the opening scene of Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss, we see a bald-headed prostitute using her bare hands to beat the crap…
Picture Mommy Dead with Zsa Zsa Gabor (instead of original choice Gene Tierney and originally hired Hedy Lamarr). The 1960s shlocker Picture Mommy Dead starts out promisingly. An unstable girl…
The Cervantes Center of Arts & Letters will celebrate the birth centennial of Mexican actor-singer superstar Tito Guízar (1908–1999) with a screening of the 1936 cowboy musical (“charro”) Alla en…
Lifeboat cast (top) and Shadow of a Doubt cast (bottom): Alfred Hitchcock mid-1940s classics. Even though I’ve never been a major Alfred Hitchcock fan, I do find the vast majority of…
Peter Greenaway directs Nightwatching. British cinema is back in full force at the 2007 Venice Film Festival According to press reports, among the favorites to win the several Venice 2007…
Bugsy movie with Annette Bening and Warren Beatty. Barry Levinson’s 1991 best picture nominee Bugsy is the next feature in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ “Great To…
The Godfather: Part III with Diane Keaton, George Hamilton, and Al Pacino. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1990 best picture nominee The Godfather, Part III will be the next feature presentation in the…
The confusing and utterly forgettable thriller Slow Burn is a poor copy of Bryan Singer’s classic The Usual Suspects. Ray Liotta stars.
Comedian Jim Carrey is badly cast against type in Joel Schumacher ‘s absurd metaphysical thriller The Number 23. Virginia Madsen costars.
Ryan Phillippe and Chris Cooper deliver first-rate performances in Billy Ray’s mature spy thriller Breach, based on the FBI’s infamous Robert Hanssen case.
In his 1966 ‘Swinging London’ masterwork Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni questions the perception of reality. David Hemmings + Vanessa Redgrave star.
Inside Man offers a long day’s journey into nought: I’ve seen little of Spike Lee’s oeuvre. As far as I’m concerned, the overblown portrayal of ethnic relations in Do the…
Géla Babluani’s thriller 13 Tzameti, winner of the World Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, offers a relentlessly bleak – and downright exploitive – look at…
Fabián Bielinsky dead at 47: Second (and last) feature film, ‘The Aura,’ was screened a few days ago at the Los Angeles Film Festival Argentinean filmmaker Fabián Bielinsky has died…
Paris, France, middle of the night. An old man is walking alone in a darkened gallery in the Louvre. He approaches a painting. Another man – the evil twin of…
The crime drama Walk Softly Stranger was RKO’s biggest flop of the year. It became a blotch on Joseph Cotten’s resumé, shortened Robert Stevenson’s directorial career at the studio, and…
Marni Nixon: Making Deborah Kerr, Natalie Wood, and Audrey Hepburn sound more melodious. Marni Nixon, the voice behind, among others, Deborah Kerr in The King and I and An Affair…
Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon. Gus Van Sant’s 1997 Best Picture nominee Good Will Hunting will be the next feature in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’…
Veteran Olivia de Havilland jumped on the aging-actress horror-film bandwagon with the lurid shocker Lady in a Cage. That said, I must add that the film, directed by Walter Grauman…
Matte painting tecniques displayed in Forbidden Planet. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer release, Fred M. Wilcox’s 1956 science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet was seemingly inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Cyril Hume was credited…
Film noir New York: Sweet Smell of Success with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. Whenever I think of film noir, I – somewhat incongruously – immediately picture murder and mayhem…
The Departed with Leonardo DiCaprio. Best Picture Academy Award winner The Departed boasts a respectable pedigree: the cop thriller was directed by Martin Scorsese; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; shot by…
In Anthony Mann’s action-packed B film noir Desperate, the lights don’t have to go out for danger to strike. When a clean-cut delivery man (Steve Brodie) gets accidentally involved in a…