Movies work by building and releasing tension, a pattern demonstrated more nakedly in the musical than in nearly any other genre.
Few modern films so intensely refuse to stick to the medium’s established spatial and temporal principles.
10:30 P.M. Summer is ludicrous enough to merit inclusion in the recent Cult Camp Classics DVD collection.
10:30 P.M. is still too early for Dassin’s turgid melodrama.
Surviving better than it should, Red Dawn comes to teach a new generation about the perils of commie invasions.
Welles’s underrated third effort gets no love in this DVD version, but it’s still a virtuosic, fascinating work.
Released in the midst of renewed Cold War nuclear dread, Red Dawn doesn’t starve for unintended wackiness.
Orson Welles’s The Stranger is the comeuppance that Hollywood felt he deserved for being such an arrogant genius.
Molière offers a harmless, fairly breezy fabulist romp about the life of the great French satirist.
Dos Santos’s notorious anti-establishment allegory is still a pungent meal.
Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s film is jaundiced cultural allegory dressed up as anthropological re-creation.
You’d have to go to Barbara Billingsley for another jive session this enjoyable.
A bare-bones DVD, but this is a forgotten 1930s melodrama worth discovering.
The film’s optimistic integration of intellectual and physical impulses lends it a feeling of wholeness closer to Howard Hawks’s later, more serene films.
Slender but lovingly textured, The Wedding Night is worth discovering.
Fuller’s CinemaScope rectangular compositions retain their vitality, and the sub seems to sport a crisp new coat of paint.
It achieves true force only once it ventures past abstract homily and into visceral concreteness.
Eastwood’s other western trilogy won’t be challenged, but this set gives an interesting view of a star at a crucial crossroads in his career.
The San Francisco International Film Festival might be forgiven for a bit of self-love.
American film in the ’70s extracted much of its power from documenting the fallout from the dreams of the ’60s.