Witchcraft comedy, fittingly bewitching, from the John Van Druten stage play, exploring extensively the metaphor of love as a magical power, a spell, an enchantment, a transfigurement. Meaningful use of the Bohemian ambience of Greenwich Village (regardless how artificially reproduced on the backlot); smartly cast, from the top-billed James Stewart …
Italian spoof of the Rififi-type caper film, and enough of an archetype in its own right to win a lot of tolerance for director Mario Monicelli throughout his prolific career. The buildup achieves a genial sense of proletarian oneness, though no eruptive laughs. Those are reserved for the climactic caper: …
Louis Malle's directorial debut at age t25, a craftsmanly thriller about a pair of illicit lovers and homicidal co-conspirators — never seen together on screen — whose Perfect Crime deflates into a suffocating nightmare. Atmospheric photography by Henri Decae; voguish improvisatory jazz score by Miles Davis. Originally released in the …
Kurosawa's first use of the wide screen, and his ingeniousness with images of that shape becomes apparent fairly soon — say about the first or second shot. The storyline, if not the images alone, pulls you in, and along, with a folk-tale kind of enchantment, and it makes room for …
The first, and finest, of Christopher Lee's numerous appearances as the Transylvanian bloodsucker for the Hammer film studio. (Let us not speak of his appearance in the unspeakable Count Dracula for Jesus Franco in Spain.) This is the movie, too, that deserves recognition for taking the single greatest stride in …
It would take conscious effort to recall, when watching it today, that this movie ever enjoyed a notoriety for erotic scintillation (or for anything much beyond a kind of Emma Bovaryan romantic mooniness). The indulgence in epicureanism and high-toned party-talk might seem to cater more toward those appetites addressed (much …
Luis Buñuel's picaresque tale about the impossibility in this miserable world of following the path to Christian perfection, told with an unrelenting De Sade-ian nastiness but with a much nicer sense of irony. A movie that gives sustenance to long-suffering believers and merciless scoffers alike. With Francisco Rabal; based on …
Spend an enchanted evening anywhere but with this stiff.
Douglas Sirk's polished transcription of William Faulkner's Pylon, a tale of barnstorming pilots between world wars, might be easy to overlook among his Universal Studio melodramas of the Fifties: it's in ungaudy black-and-white, for starters, and the milieu is more that of Hawks and Wellman. The resulting losses are mainly …
Orson Welles at his most orotund as director, but not quite most rotund as actor. Rotund enough, though. ("You're a mess, honey," he is told by a wise Mexican whore. "You ought to lay off those candy bars." And later, after he has sent an underling to fetch coffee, he …
An Agatha Christie mystery, deceitfully plotted according to her wont, and stagily unravelled in courtroom and lawyer's office. It is given a measure of fun by Charles Laughton's performance as the crotchety, sickly defense attorney (in a rush, he snatches the syringe out of his nursemaid's hand and, as he …