Is the title a score? -- as in, the Fast and the Furious all knotted up at two. Or is it a head count, a poll? The ex-cop from Los Angeles (Paul Walker, resuming his role from the unquantified The Fast and the Furious of two years earlier) is undeniably …
Ingmar Bergman's characters suffer from many things, one of them being logorrhea. They talk directly to the camera, they talk solitarily to themselves, they talk to framed photographs, and of course, when given the chance, they talk each other's ears off, but even then their gaze tends to wander into …
Trivia experts will instantly peg Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s as the title splashed across the Radio City Music Hall marquee while Michael Corleone and his future bride, Kay, do their Christmas shopping in The Godfather. McCarey’s Bells really has more in common with Coppola’s second installment, inasmuch …
Grind-it-out romantic thriller centered around a blind violinist who, no sooner than she receives a corneal transplant, becomes an eyewitness to a murder, albeit a blurry eyewitness, and hence a potential victim. In that nutshell, it sounds about right for Ingrid Bergman or Ida Lupino, if Ingrid or Ida swore …
Damsel-in-distress theatrical melodrama whose fundamental premise has added a word to the English language, a verb transformed from a noun: "to gaslight," meaning something like "to drive crazy; to attempt to induce madness in another; to cause a person to doubt his or her sanity." Fussy, fusty MGM production; dated …
Documentarian and unmistakable cinephile Stig Björkman — one of his side jobs is translating Woody Allen for Swedish audiences — gets handed the golden key that unlocks the Bergman vault. Told almost exclusively in her own words — from diary pages the actress first began filling at age 14, to …
Unglamorous romance and espionage in mid-Fifties Berlin, with a smoothly negotiated turn to black comedy near the finish. Classy, well-made, but undermined by dubious casting choices: Anthony Hopkins, a Welshman, playing the Yank, sporting a loud, aggressive, unconvincing accent (topped off by a jumbo cigar); and the American Campbell Scott …
One might have hoped that if anybody could discipline Liza Minnelli, it would be her father. Unhappily, he only indulges her, giving her preposterous dream scenes and handsome escorts and gowns cut deep to the bust of her pudgy, rubber-doll figure -- the very things he gave to Barbra Streisand …
A movie mystery with accoutrements of the finest quality (an all-star cast, photography by Geoffrey Unsworth, production design by Tony Walton, title and montage sequences by Richard Williams) but with the soul of a Charlie Chan-ish, B-grade, grindhouse product. It comes from an Agatha Christie story, and she knows only …
Alfred Hitchcock's high-rent spy romance, in romantic Rio de Janeiro, maintains an atmosphere of crackling sexual tension, with Ingrid Bergman as a loose liver wooed (too well) by a suave American agent, and propelled, against both their better wishes, into squeamish wedlock with a Nazi. Cary Grant, Claude Rains, Louis …
Hitchcock's psychoanalytic murder mystery makes use of the subject, indifferently, just for a fresh new gimmick (a Freudian sleuth played by Ingrid Bergman in eyeglasses) instead of for its real possibilities. Where those possibilities start is in Gregory Peck's private stifled panics about any kind of striation on a white …
A serious (and unsentimental) consideration of faith and the Omnipotent. Set in the late Seventies, when the Catholic Church required three miracles for sainthood in place of the new lowered standard of two, it tells of a grassroots campaign to canonize an immigrant Chicago woman, linked to good works in …
In Australia, to be more precise, and during the 1800s. A Gothic costume drama from Hitchcock's dull, late-Forties period, just after The Paradine Case and Rope and just before Stage Fright, with long takes and long talks and an interesting Ingrid Bergman.