One Show Only! It’s become a shorthand reference for swinging Rome and the louche early ‘60s, but then Moby Dick isn’t really about a whale. Marcello Mastroianni’s playboy journalist cavorts through the city, chasing celebrities and women and eroding his soul in the process. Speaking of shorthand, this is where the full floweri more »
Yasujirō Ozu gets a bit soapy here, albeit in an Ozu kind of way. A bored salaryman (Ryō Ikebe) feeling distanced from his wife (Chikage Awashima) starts an affair with a young colleague (Keiko Kishi). Really, just admiring the director’s trademark three-or-four-shot transitions is almost worth the price of admission alone. -Lee more »
The United States’ involvement in the 1960 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and the country’s subsequent decline into decades of dictatorship and ongoing instability is well-established. Filmmaker John Grimonprez creates a stylish and verve-y account of that history by infusing his 2024 documentary with the musi more »
Michael Curtiz out-pulps James M. Cain’s original novel, staging a murder in the very first scene and streamlining the melodrama. The resulting adaptation not only brings the noir, it amps up the class division and the mother/daughter love/hate. If you ever wondered why Joan Crawford was a big deal, this is an excellent way to f more »
For 13-year-old boys of all ages. Back in the day, the titular comic brought European artists like Jean “Moebius” Giraud and “adult” themes to newstands. The titular film brings a brace of the comic’s stories to life through budget animation and a soundtrack crammed with bespoke tunes from classic rockers. Content warning: many, more »
It’s a genuine shock when Chet Baker cops to being 57 in this biodoc—he looks 30 years older. The contrast between his heartthrob younger days as the Great White Hope of jazz trumpet and the withered, scuffling addict of his final year on earth fuels fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s suitably elegant film. Despite the ad-campai more »
The fact that RKO cut nearly an hour out of Orson Welles’ follow-up to Citizen Kane and it still stands as one of the greatest films ever made has inspired decades of pained what-ifs. Welles shadows the title Midwestern clan as their 19th-century wealth and influence succumbs to onrushing modernity and simple hubris. Every scene more »
A suburban dad falls hard for his charismatic new neighbor. more »
Our lives are the sum of our choices. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. more »
Every generation seems to have their coming-of-age film that Gets It. For the ‘80s kids, it was River’s Edge. A suburban hesher kills his girlfriend and shows his friends (including Keanu Reeves and Crispin Glover) her discarded body. Poorly equipped to deal by their ‘70s-hangover upbringings, they react mostly by not reacting a more »
A desperately single bookseller, lost in a fantasy world, finds herself forced to fulfil her dreams of becoming a writer in order to stop messing up her love life. more »
The Nouveau Roman’s big-screen bow remains baffling and entrancing. Alain Renais’ camera prowls the Baroque halls and grounds of a luxe resort and occasionally alights on the dispassionate constituents of a love triangle as screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet’s narration goes on about its own elliptical business. An indelible cinem more »
A brother and sister uncover a terrifying ritual at the secluded home of their new foster mother. more »
As usual for a Pedro Almodóvar film, the plot here is so kinked and outrageous as to defy encapsulation. But wellspring performances from Cecelia Roth, Marisa Paredes, and Penélope Cruz wow. The director’s exploration of motherhood, sisterhood, and chosen family beguiles. And it looks like a billion pesetas. -LeeGardner more »
A pair of Werner Herzog’s underseen documentary shorts. God’s Angry Man focuses on Gene Scott, an old-school televangelist with a combative style—Herzog finds him glowering silently into a live television camera until the donations flow. High-speed cameras catch champion ski jumper Steiner flying high over spectators on his way more »
The story of a family and a family business. more »
Dario Argento’s black-gloved hands strike again, this time racking up gruesome killings that mirror the ones Tony Franciosa’s novelist invented for his books. Can the scribbler figure out who’s taking his work as bloody inspiration before he falls victim? Crazy stalkers! Axe murders! Lesbians! Insane twists! C-movie bellwether J more »
What was the first action movie? One could make an argument for Henri-George Clouzot’s hot-sweat epic. There are only a few fights or firearms involved as desperate men (led by Yves Montand) stranded in a jungle hellhole seize a shot at trucking volatile nitroglycerin over hundreds of miles of gnarly road, but the two-fisted plo more »
A life-affirming, genre-bending story based on Stephen King's novella about three chapters in the life of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz. more »
A matchmaker's lucrative business is complicated when she falls into a toxic love triangle that threatens her clients. more »
What a treasure. Roma filmmaker Tony Gatlif uses his camera to track a real-life odyssey—the migration of Roma people and their musical culture from their roots in Rajasthan, in India, along the Mediterranean to Spain. No interviews, no title cards, no context. Just intimate, vibrant music and dance performances, almost any of w more »
Even “minor” Hitchcock looms tall over most directors’ peaks. Here he crams the title vessel with survivors from a WWII U-boat attack and wrests a world of drama, suspense, and intrigue from the cramped space between the gunwales. Tallulah Bankhead toplines a sterling cast. -Lee Gardner more »
A group of survivors of the rage virus lives on a small island. When one of the group leaves the island on a mission into the mainland, he discovers secrets, wonders, and horrors that have mutated not only the infected but other survivors. more »
Paul Verhoeven’s polarizing cinema punchline has aged well in the sense that it hasn’t gotten any worse. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhaz’s script about a frequently nude naif dancing her way to the top in Las Vegas remains a ridiculous line-o-rama, but the real reason the film inspires lols is poor Elizabeth Berkley, whose too-much p more »
David Lynch followed up the mold-breaking Eraserhead with perhaps his most classically Hollywood feature, and his most deeply affecting. John Hurt’s embodiment of the title character astonishes, but the film is really about how the other characters see and react to him. Anthony Hopkins, for one, reacts exquisitely. -Lee Gardner more »
Melvil Poupaud’s feckless young man heads for a beach town solo to mope, play guitar, and wait for his on/off girlfriend to arrive. He soon finds himself unsuccessfully juggling several young women, including anthropologist/waitress Amanda Langlet. One of Éric Rohmer’s most charming and amusing chatfests, enhanced by the sun-bak more »
Five years post-Jurassic World Dominion, an expedition braves isolated equatorial regions to extract DNA from three massive prehistoric creatures for a groundbreaking medical breakthrough. more »
Sex. Death. Sex and death. David Cronenberg plays all the hits in his adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel about a group of turned-on car-crash enthusiasts who go further and further in their pursuit of souped-up kicks. James Spader, Deborah Kara Unger, Elias Koteas, and Holly Hunter kink up the screen, despite Spader’s character’ more »
George Sanders plays a man who is somehow tired of being married to Ingrid Bergman, who plays his similarly ennui-laden spouse. A trip to Italy exposes the faults in their relationship. That’s pretty much it, but Roberto Rosselini’s direction and the lovely performances make it feel like grand drama. -Lee Gardner more »
