God knows I’ve tried on several occasions to grasp the genius of this vaunted chestnut, the wormy apple of John Huston fan’s eyes. Even a 35mm dye-transfer Technicolor® print wasn’t enough to recruit me. The last thing this reporter wants to do is book passage up river with a grimy …
Jean Simmons is a fine actress, but a femme fatale she is not. Even a deceptively angelic femme fatale, much less a ball-busting dominator of Robert Mitchum. Memorable end, for her and for the movie. With Herbert Marshall, Mona Freeman, Jim Backus; directed by Otto Preminger.
A candy-colored Inside Show Biz musical, directed by Vincente Minnelli. The private jokes, the campy parody, and the cheerful cynicism give the movie its air of knowingness; but the disruptively dazzling musical numbers are never brought together into a stable framework or consistent style. With Fred Astaire as an aging …
Brutal crime-buster movie, not just in the limited sense of the famous coffee-in-the-face scene and the subsequent Phantom of the Opera makeup job. It is brutal, beyond that, although to less effect, in the lack of all artifice and adornment with which it lays out its issues. It lays them …
Fred Zinnemann directs Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, and some kid named Sinatra in this WWII melodrama.
At the start, there's a swift and sustained twenty minutes or so, painstakingly pieced together with wary point-of-view shots and edgy circuitous dialogue, as the finger of guilt turns toward a Catholic priest, who has learned the real killer's identity in the confession box. This places the priest in what's …
An evident filching and ineffectual rewording of a Tennessee Williams title, for use on a blue-collar comedy by Luis Buñuel. The movie overall -- except for the staging of a neighborhood religious pageant, which demonstrates a perfect understanding that such amateur theatrics needn't be exaggerated in order to be hilarious …
Federico Fellini's biting, early masterpiece about a quartet of rudderless, smalltown young men who subscribe without passion or energy to most of the Seven Cardinal Sins, who dream commonplaces, who take animal satisfaction from whatever is within easy reach, and who in no sense ever raise themselves from their backsides.
When Andrew Sarris classified a chapter of his Pantheon-defining "The American Cinema" as “Subjects for Further Research,” he had filmmakers like Kinuyo Tanaka in mind. The celebrated actress, known for her collaborations with Kenji Mizoguchi (Sansho the Bailiff, Ugetsu, The Life of Oharu), was also the second woman in Japanese …
Infidelity and foul play amid the postcard attractions of Honeymoon Heaven, U.S.A. The tabloid sensationalism centers around a Korean Conflict veteran (Joseph Cotten, a real sourpuss), who suffers from postwar depression, and his restless wife (Marilyn Monroe in her early, slutty period). On the sidelines, a jolly Shredded Wheat salesman …
A two-bit pickpocket unwittingly picks his way into the middle of a Soviet spy ring. One of Samuel Fuller's higher-profile productions (20th Century-Fox, Richard Widmark, Jean Peters), much admired by the French, even imitated by Bresson, with added philosophy, in Pickpocket. The McCarthy-era melodramatics are pretty crude, but the details …
No, not the top-notch Western of the same name (1956, Robert Ryan, Jeffrey Hunter, a no-name director, a haunting whistled theme song), but a cinematic artifact of some interest nonetheless, a lump of soft-boiled French Existentialism (title in its native tongue: Les Orgueilleux) about an impending meningitis epidemic in a …
William Wyler's poor-little-rich-girl fairy tale — checked by a powerful and rueful sense of reality — about a savvy American journalist who shows a sheltered princess a good time on the town. The feminine role, possibly Audrey Hepburn's signature role, maximizes the actress's opposite sides, her outward, otherworldly refinement and …
William Wyler's poor-little-rich-girl fairy tale — checked by a powerful and rueful sense of reality — about a savvy American journalist who shows a sheltered princess a good time on the town. The feminine role, possibly Audrey Hepburn's signature role, maximizes the actress's opposite sides, her outward, otherworldly refinement and …