I was delighted to hear of the premiere at this year’s Cannes film festival of a 269-minute restored version of Sergio Leone’s final masterwork, Once Upon a Time in America (1984). I love this film for many reasons, not least, because of the way it successfully channels the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer notoriously difficult ... read more »

For a science fiction film francise to become truly successful, it helps not to be too original.  The most successful of these franchises are based on ideas that have been floating around pop culture long enough for audiences to feel comfortable with them (see, e.g., Star Wars or Avatar), as opposed to films based on comparatively ... read more »

Now playing at the local Arthouse – Can’t you just see it on the marquee?

“The thumb isn’t good enough for you. You have to use your whole body.”  Naked underneath her trenchcoat, frightened hitchhiker Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) gets private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) to stop his car by standing in the middle of the highway with her arms outstretched in an X pattern.  This is the first time we ... read more »

Walt Disney’s masterpiece, Fantasia, may seem at first like a random collection of animated shorts whose only common factor is that each was inspired by a well-known piece of classical music.  However, consciously or not, the film has a deeper unifying principle.  Each of the film’s episodes touches in one way or another upon the ... read more »

Director George Sidney is known mainly for: (1) glamourizing women, and (2) showing the audience a good time. In The Three Musketeers (1948), he does both. The principal woman glamourized is Lana Turner as the treacherous Milady de Winter. June Allyson, Marie Windsor, Patricia Medina, and Angela Lansbury also get the Sidney treatment in smaller roles. ... read more »

Do you recognize this dastardly villain? It’s Boris Karloff, playing a hostile Native American in The Last of the Mohicans (1920) directed by Maurice Tourneur. The hero of the film was another Native American, Uncas, played by Alan Roscoe (standing, below).  Subsequent versions such as Michael Mann’s would make Hawkeye, Uncas’s white companion, the hero of ... read more »

The Frenchman, Maurice Tourneur, and the Austrian, Richard Oswald, were major producer/directors during cinema’s Silent Era, but are hardly remembered today. These days, movie lovers are more likely to know the films and television shows directed by their sons — Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Out of the Past), and Gerd Oswald (Brainwashed, Screaming ... read more »

Like Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., Christopher Nolan’s Inception, or Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch invites the viewer to deconstruct a narrative puzzle – nested realities, stories embedded within stories – that in Snyder’s case allows him to present a series of meticulously rendered alternate worlds. As anybody who has seen or read ... read more »

Producer as Auteur - The Exile is a swashbuckler, written by, produced by, and starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.  It was the first American film to be completed by the German-Jewish director, Max Ophuls.  It was plainly a vanity project for producer/star Fairbanks in which he played an exiled King (Charles II of England) who, as conceived by Fairbanks ... read more »