Even with extreme caution, Resnais's first feature can be called one of the most influential movies ever made. It had critics grasping for Proust or Bergson, and filmmakers grasping for the scissors, much more often, in the cutting room. And yet Resnais has afterwards managed to top this achievement with …
Howard Hawks's mischievously screwed-up version of the MacArthur-Hecht newspaper comedy, The Front Page. The ace reporter, Hildy, has been transformed, or rather transsexualized, into Rosalind Russell (which is not exactly an emasulation of the role), and the result bears a striking resemblance to Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth, with Cary …
After being asked by God to sacrifice his only son, Abraham's faith is tested as he journeys to the mountain of Moriah to make an unthinkable sacrifice.
Spanish historical documentary film directed by José Luis López-Linares.
Alan Bennett's much-decorated theater piece comes to the screen with its original stage director and cast intact: Nicholas Hytner, that would be, and Richard Griffiths, Stephen Campbell Moore, Frances de la Tour, et al. A permanent record, as it were, further decorated, for the occasion, with extraneous bits of rockin' …
Further unpleasantness from the always unpleasant David Cronenberg. Despite the pretentious-sounding title, this is in no sense an historical record of violence as a human fundamental (dating back, say, to Cain and Abel, or farther back to the appearance of the monolith among the apes in 2001), but merely a …
A sort of stretched-out version of Hemingway's The Killers, but not stretched out by way of flashbacks, like earlier screen treatments of The Killers itself, but rather with present-tense delaying tactics. Two London thugs have to transport a police informer from his hideaway in Spain to his scheduled retribution in …
An anonymous Date Doctor, working by personal referrals only, dispenses self-help slogans ("With no guile and no game, there's no girl") and empirical pearls of wisdom ("Eight out of ten women believe that one kiss will tell them everything they need to know about a relationship") to a select group …
Instead of following author Stephen Rebello’s fine Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by turning out a procedural on the art of making a masterpiece, Sacha Gervasi (Anvil: The Story of Anvil) gives us a watered-down romcom directed in the style of an episode of Hitchcock Presents. (It’s ostensibly …
Published in 1966, Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut was the first book to take a title-by-title approach to exploring a director’s career. It also made it cool to like Alfred Hitchcock. A Hollywood master and an internationally acclaimed Parisian newcomer couldn’t have been more diverse, but Hitch, instantly sensing a fellow …
Extremely unpleasant suspense film. C. Thomas Howell, drowsy at the wheel of a Chicago-to-San-Diego drive-away, pulls over and picks up a rain-soaked hitchhiker, Rutger Hauer (pretty unpleasant right there, you might think, but there's more). The passenger's conversation, occasionally punctuated by switchblade, consists of stuff like: "You wanna know what …
Extensive re-write of the 1986 road-movie thriller of the same name, altering but not eliminating the truck-pull pièce de résistance, the tearing of limb from limb. What emerges from the overhaul is a no-fun Spring Break for a collegiate Cute Couple harassed by a homicidal highway menace (supernatural or just …
End-of-the-world science fiction as filtered through the sensibility of zany, nutty, Monty Python-y British humor. The trendy, youthy, culty Douglas Adams book, now a quarter of a century old, demonstrates itself to be less than timeless. With Martin Freeman, Zooey Deschanel, Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, and the voice of Alan …