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...
Love, Cheat & Steal
November 18, 2011
During the 1990’s, neo-noirs were all the rage with some good (The Hot Spot), some not so good (Malice) and some great (L.A. Confidential). Lie, Cheat & Steal (1993) falls somewhere in the middle with its cast of B-movie stars and paint-by-numbers...
Hickey & Boggs
September 22, 2011
It has been well-documented how the 1970’s were a golden age for American cinema with many risky and unusual films being made and released through a Hollywood studio system in disarray after the surprise breakthrough success of Easy Rider (1969). One...
The Last of the Finest
September 15, 2011
The Last of the Finest (1990) is one of those films that you end up discovering on television late at night when there’s nothing else on and you can’t sleep. It has the feel of a generic cop show, something Michael Mann might’ve knocked off in his...
Riot on Sunset Strip
July 14, 2011
Riot on Sunset Strip (1967) comes courtesy of American International Pictures producer Sam Katzman a.k.a. “King of the Quickies.” He was known for making topical exploitation films often dealing with rebellious youth. This film was shot and released...
Johnny Cool
July 11, 2011
Johnny Cool (1963) is a curious cinematic oddity, an offbeat footnote in Rat Pack lore. Produced by Peter Lawford and featuring fellow Rat Packers Sammy Davis Jr. (who also sings the swinging theme song), Joey Bishop, and Henry Silva as the title character,...
Laws of Gravity
June 23, 2011
Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity (1992) was part of an exciting crop of American independent films to come out in the early to mid-1990’s and arguably the best of the Mean Streets (1973) wannabes to be made. It also featured a cast of young, up and coming...
Sweet Karma
June 16, 2011
Sweet Karma (2009) attempts to do what Eastern Promises (2007) did for the Russian mafia in England, only by setting it in Toronto, Canada, and with a smaller budget and minus the big name talent. So, instead of Naomi Watts, this film has Playboy Playmate...
Pale Flower: Criterion Collection
June 13, 2011
Masahiro Shinoda is considered to be one of the filmmakers that pioneered the Japanese New Wave of cinema and with Pale Flower (1964) he created a moody film noir, a story of a doomed love affair between two gambling junkies. Shonda got his start as an...
