One of the better of Otto Preminger's sprawling adaptations of big, fat, multi-character, best-selling novels, this one Allen Drury's melodramatic civics lesson on cut-throat politics in D.C. The large cast -- Fonda, Laughton, Pidgeon, Don Murray, George Grizzard, Burgess Meredith, Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney (a comeback role for the star …
The fifty-fourth and final film of Yasujiro Ozu, in his most rigid and repetitive style. The theme, of father abandoned by daughter in marriage, has been done by Ozu with greater emotional impact. (Where? Was it in Early Spring? No artist outside of novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett gives the memory more …
One of the earliest and still proudest examples of the Brazilian Cinema Nôvo, based on the celebrated Graciliano Ramos novel — a South American Grapes of Wrath — about a peasant family scratching out a living in the inclement Northeast. It offers a brutally materialistic vision of life, in the …
Nasty piece of work about a paroled rapist (a thoroughly malevolent Robert Mitchum, rivalling himself in The Night of the Hunter for sheer badness) who threatens an encore performance on the wife and/or daughter of the lawyer who put him away. Much superior to the remake by Scorsese (who re-used …
Racing into Rome early one morning, smooth-talking, fast-walking Vittorio Gassman just needs to borrow someone's phone - even sleepy, uptight law student Jean-Louis Trintignant's will do. Bored and with nothing better on tap, the two hit the road in Gassman's souped-up Lancia Aurelia, blazing past farmers, priests, and bicyclists, honking …
Third in the loosely connected trilogy (connected not by recurrent characters, but by theme, mood, the marmoreal Monica Vitti, and a title consisting of a definite article and a noun) which established Antonioni as such a polestar in the cinema of the early Sixties. The last and least of the …
Around the conventional sci-fi gimmick of time travel (post-WWIII), Chris Marker develops a love story and a meditation on memory that puts you in mind of Resnais. (He collaborated on some of Resnais's shorts in the Fifties, and was included, with Resnais, in the Left Bank group of the New …
The movie that introduced, world-wide, the tormented eyes of Peter O'Toole and the moony eyes of Omar Sharif is, more importantly, an unabridged lexicon of sun-and-sand imagery. Scrupulously compiled by director David Lean and his photographer Freddie Young (Nicolas Roeg served on the second unit), it's the standard reference work …
Into the Parisian underworld, with Americophile Jean-Pierre Melville as our guide: the ambience (the solitary streetlamp, the smoky bar, the anonymous staircase) is impeccable, which is to say it has little connection to the contemporary real world; the mood is that of a cool-jazz blues number, doleful but aloof; and …
The casting is a little off, all along the front line -- Sue Lyon, James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, with the latter two, particularly, tripping into merry caricature. The excesses may be under director Kubrick's behest, for they are habitually his dish; still, despite a few mistaken dips into …
The periodic drunken bender of a New Frontier cowboy lands him, for once, in more trouble than he bargained for, and the trouble escalates into a test of his survival and his self-image in the modern world. The symbols of the Age of Technology are a little heavy-handedly drawn, but …
A good version of a great play, about the destructiveness of the family. Dean Stockwell is a little lightweight as O'Neill's autobiographical stand-in, and Katharine Hepburn is a little too Katharine Hepburn. But Ralph Richardson is all you could want of the wanting patriarch, and Jason Robards, Jr., is pretty …
Alberto Lattuada's "Family" film. It tells of a toplofty foreman at a Fiat factory in Milan, portrayed by that Italian national icon, Alberto Sordi (Fellini's The White Sheik and I Vitelloni, most prestigiously), whose balloon-like ego, perilously puffed up and easily pricked, stretches well across the border between comedy and …
Sinatra paints an attractively washed-out portrait of a U.S. intelligence officer (a.k.a. "stupidity officer," in a line that tickled Dwight Macdonald). His fatigue and jitters seem an appropriate reaction to, and comment on, the task of propping up a delirious political thriller composed of tight-skinned, glassy-eyed zombies (Laurence Harvey, Henry …