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Adventure in Istanbul: Topkapi (1964)
Today (Dec. 8) is Maximilian Schell’s birthday. The handsome Swiss actor is one of my favorite screen performers and he would have been 85 today if he hadn’t passed away in 2014 after abruptly...
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Living in the Past: The Music Room (1958)
Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard both use similar visual motifs to communicate the decay of body and spirit with their principal characters. We see their homes, those of Charles Foster Kane and Norma...
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An Unexpected Farewell: Leslie Howard’s Spitfire (1942)
With World War II ramping up in his native Britain, Leslie Howard felt compelled to redirect the focus of his film career to the war effort. He also wanted to expand into producer and directorial...
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Takin’ a Ride
Back when poster shops could be found next to any video arcades it was one of the more popular designs: an astronaut seated in a Corvette floating in space with a nebula cloud behind him. It was a...
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Crash Course in Editing: Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Comic book films and action movies tend to use a fast-paced style of editing combined with close framings and jittery camera movement. The editing has been dubbed post-classical or hyper-editing,...
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Getting Physical: Athina Rachel Tsangari
In the first shot of her first film, Athina Rachel Tsangari depicts a close up of a warring kiss, two tongues battling for position. This image from Fit, her 1994 short film, is one not of love or...
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Dreams in the Witch House (1977)
It took the West a few decades to finally catch up with the phantasmagorical output of Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, whose feverish sugar rush cinema would make Baz Luhrmann cry uncle....
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Venomous Snakes & Poison Ants: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
“What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.” – Miranda in Picnic at Hanging Rock (a variation of A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe) In Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging...
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The Horrifying, Mystifying Journey of Walkabout (1971)
Nicolas Roeg, a director not celebrated enough in my opinion, directed some of my favorite movies of the seventies. He directed Performance (1970), Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth...
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Make Movies Short Again
One of the great things about films from Hollywood’s pre-Code era (besides the excessive boozing, blatant depictions of sex and strong, independent women) is the runtime. A vast majority of films made...
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Mad Max (1979): The Beginning of the End
George Miller’s first feature length film, Mad Max (1979), became his career defining achievement. That is, like two other Georges (Romero and Lucas with Night of the Living Dead and Star Wars,...
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They Don’t Make Stars Like. . . Well, You Know the Rest
Recently, I re-visited the extraordinary stars of the past by viewing The Love Goddesses (1965), a documentary streaming on The Criterion Channel of FilmStruck. Directed by Saul J. Turell, this...
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Black & Blue Christmas: Placido (1961)
Placido (1961) takes place over the course of one chaotic Christmas Eve night as a provincial Spanish town desperately tries to prove its Christian charity. It is a ferociously funny black comedy...
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Let It Snow: Ikiru (1952), a Different Kind of Holiday Classic
As we head into the final stretch of 2016, a year that will certainly live in everyone’s memory for a variety of reasons, the holidays seem to carry a bit more weight than usual. Nevertheless, it’s...
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Stranger Than Fiction: The Baron of Arizona (1949)
“In the movie business, a good ending must sometimes hold sway over the truth.” – Samuel Fuller, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking Before Samuel Fuller wrote and directed his...
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Happy, Yes, But Not So Lucky
Several years ago, I can’t remember quite when, I saw Mike Leigh’s first work, Secrets & Lies (1996), and I was more than a little fascinated with how the movie felt. I didn’t see it in its...
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Head For the Bunker, It’s A Carol For Another Christmas!
There are countless film and television adaptations of Charles Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol, a mainstay each holiday season. The most popular of these adaptations include the 1938 version...
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Getting Away with Murder
Today’s topic is probably not the one you were expecting to see on Christmas Day proper, but as a film programmer I’ve always enjoyed counter-programming. With that in mind, my double-feature...
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A Forgotten Film to Remember: The Whole Town’s Talking (1935)
I once took a couple of noncredit courses on the early films of John Ford. I thought I knew a great deal about Ford, but, as taught by talented filmmaker and learned film scholar Michael G. Smith, the...
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Film Discoveries of 2016
As 2016 staggers to a close, I am looking back at the pockets of film pleasure I enjoyed from the year that was. This season is clogged with lists, and here I offer another, though one more suited to...
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