It has often been said that Ludlam had two modes for his plays: tight and sprawling, and these two films neatly fit that paradigm.
When a great director goes wrong, they usually don’t go wrong in a small way.
Taken in total, these Akerman films have only whetted my appetite for more from her scattered, mysterious career.
There was always something hard and saucy about Jean Simmons’s demeanor.
The Blind Side is a ghastly but revealing movie, not least for one scene with Adriane Lenox.
I’m not sure how Mulholland Drive would look to me now that this decade is ending.
Cheri has its problems, and given the dubious video presentation on this DVD edition, now it has more.
A Time to Love and a Time to Die isn’t one of Douglas Sirk’s best films, but it’s most likely one of his most personal.
Binoche has descended on Brooklyn’s Academy of Music with a full-blown, Renaissance woman vengeance.
Robert Montgomery’s face was boyishly cute, even as he began to show his age in the early 40s, and his characters strategically used their cuteness.
In the mid ’90s, you couldn’t escape Audrey Hepburn.
With his beefy head and saturnine manner, Mason was most himself on screen when he was spewing disgust.
The film leaves us with a rather overlong, lovey-dovey picture of Julia Child.
Repulsion refers to a lot of other movies, but its queasy black humor is entirely Polanski.
Madeline Kahn was as close as you come to a universally loved performer.
Varda turns the camera on herself and her own life, even though she convincingly posits that she’s much more interested in other people.
Colette’s ruthless sensibility gets lost in what amounts to just another costume melodrama.
A moving ode to loneliness and regret, chockablock with sensualist and observational grace notes.
Some of Hawks’s early films don’t have his distinctly dry personality, but Red Line is a helplessly personal movie about…impotence?
Sensitive and well acted as this new Grey Gardens is, it feels like a wish-fulfillment fantasy that gives Little Edie a happy ending.