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Winning Hands
I play weekly poker games, and for the last game of the year – one that we played three scant days ago – I saw my triple-digit potential winnings whittled down to almost nothing, and it all happened in...
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On the Death of Harry Carey, Jr.
During the last phase of his career, Harry Carey, Jr., appeared in small but significant parts in some of the few westerns produced in Hollywood during the 1980s. In Walter Hill’s The Long Riders, he...
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“First Look” at The Museum of the Moving Image
The beginning of the New Year means it’s time to catch up with the old. For the second year running the “First Look” series at the Museum of the Moving Image (January 4 – 13) provides an invaluable...
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Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?
The history of the movies is replete with great performances, one after another, often in the same movie. While many movies have a clear central character with no counterpart in length or breadth...
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After the Party’s Over: Gerry Anderson 1929-2012
I celebrate my birthday on December 26th and this year I woke up to the sad news that the man who was responsible for some of my favorite childhood memories had passed away on the same day that I was...
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Them bones! Them bones! The Living Skeleton on DVD!
When the Criterion Collection, via their Eclipse subsidiary, announced the release of a four-film DVD set from Japan’s Shochiku Studios, most of my fiends and fellows crowed about the imminent...
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It’s Not Too Late to Start Again (Virus 1980)
The late 1970s and early 1980s were lousy with disaster flicks, a sub-genre to which Virus unquestionably belongs. Apocalypse thrillers have always been in vogue, but they do tend to shift in tone...
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Revisiting Murder on the Orient Express
Recently I read Making Movies, Sidney Lumet’s career autobiography about his work as a director. This insightful but unpretentious bio includes no salacious stories about wild parties and loose women,...
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Aleksandr Sokurov’s Ghost Stories
Aleksandr Sokurov’s Soviet Elegy (1989) begins with a tour of tombstones, the camera floating down rows of Communist phantoms. In the next sequence, Boris Yeltsin is shown stalking down a hallway,...
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Destruction, Inc. Deconstructed
Some of the best, most inventive superhero short subjects ever produced were the Superman shorts in the early forties. The first nine were produced by Max and Dave Fleischer of Fleischer Studios and...
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Rio – Rififi Style! GRAND SLAM (1967)
I love a good heist film. They’re often formulaic and follow a well-worn path originally etched out by classic capers such as John Huston’s THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI (1955),...
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Putting the I’m back in crime
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how work had reminded me of how much I had loved westerns as a boy and how much fun, how invigorating and nourishing it was, to return to that genre with a vengeance...
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Trope-a-licious
Many years ago, my son became interested in stand up comedy and decided to start writing his own act. He did a credible job of it, actually, given that he was only 8 at the time. But one of his jokes...
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It’s a Mini-Team Effort
I recently did a post on great dual performance movies, that is, movies where two actors go head to head, both in the movie and as actors. I brought up Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in All About Eve,...
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A Crib Sheet for Sundance
I’m packing my bags today and flying out to Salt Lake City tomorrow. The first stop is the 6th annual Art House Convergence – a yearly meeting of independent and art house movie theater owners and...
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Snubbed!
Every year when the Academy Award nominations are announced, I am usually surprised by one or two curious inclusions or unexpected omissions, aka snubs. I have faithfully followed the Oscar race since...
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The Devil Inside: The Films of Kim Jee-woon
For the past decade Korea has produced the most innovative genre films in the world, with directors Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho and Kim Jee-woon reinvigorating revenge thrillers, police procedurals...
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God’s Away on Business – Child’s Play, 1972
Sidney Lumet was one of the industry’s great storytellers, successful with an array of genres and always able to take a script-heavy piece (play adaptations like 12 Angry Men, Equus and Deathtrap) and...
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William Edward Cronenweth: A Legacy in Photos
William Edward Cronenweth photographing Rita Hayworth (1947) In my ongoing quest to learn more about the talented men and women who were responsible for taking the imaginative studio portraits and set...
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Thompson! Can you hear me?
To my way of thinking there is no more cinematic an automatic weapon than the Thompson submachine gun. More than half of the association, for me, is the construction — that cylindrical magazine looks...
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