Busting
February 6, 2012
The 1970’s was a great decade for gritty buddy cop movies with the likes of The French Connection (1971) and Hickey & Boggs (1972). 1974 was a particularly good year with The Super Cops (1974), Freebie and the Bean (1974) and the largely forgotten...
Zone Troopers
February 2, 2012
As the commercial and critical failure of Cowboys & Aliens (2010) demonstrated, it is difficult to successfully blend two disparate genres. You need to have just the right mix – something that the mega-budget studio film didn’t get right. Maybe...
Manhattan
February 1, 2012
After the phenomenal success of Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen confounded the expectations of his critics and fans with Interiors (1978), which saw him doing his best Ingmar Bergman impression. It was his first dramatic film and while critical reaction...
Annie Hall
January 31, 2012
Prior to Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen was known as a comic, cutting his teeth in stand-up comedy and paying his dues as a comedy writer. When he started making films, his early efforts were flat-out comedies and farces like Bananas (1971). It wasn’t...
Godzilla: Criterion Collection
January 30, 2012
Godzilla is more than just some guy in a cheesy rubber suit terrorizing badly dubbed Japanese actors and stomping miniature cities. The original film, made in 1954, is actually a tragedy of epic proportions, a potent warning of an escalating nuclear arms...
Belle de jour: Criterion Collection
January 9, 2012
In 1967, master provocateur Luis Bunuel released one of his most celebrated films Belle de jour, an erotic tale of an unhappy bourgeois Paris housewife who works part-time at a posh brothel in order to act out her complex psychosexual fantasies. It was...
Branded to Kill: Criterion Collection
January 4, 2012
Seijun Suzuki cut his teeth on pop musicals, comedies, action and war films. Over time, he became impatient with his status as a B-movie director while some of his peers were making A movies. Often stuck with substandard screenplays, the frustrated director...
Tokyo Drifter: Criterion Collection
January 3, 2012
Seijun Suzuki made his name in Japan with hard-boiled B-crime films during the 1950’s. By the 1960’s, he took traditional Yakuza stories and juxtaposed them with an extreme Andy Warhol-esque pop art look that gleefully pushed genre conventions. He...
12 Angry Men: Criterion Collection
December 13, 2011
Adapted from the 1954 teleplay of the same name, 12 Angry Men (1957) marked the auspicious feature film debut of director Sidney Lumet who had cut his teeth on live television in New York City. He brought a gritty, edgy realism to this film, an approach...
Deadly Intent
December 12, 2011
Deadly Intent (1989) is one of those forgettable thrillers you happen to catch on television late one night, enticed by the cast of interesting character actors, and then promptly fall asleep partway through because it is so predictable. It was directed...
