Kicking & Screaming

The early to mid-1990s was a great time for American independent cinema with the likes of Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, Whit Stillman, Noah Baumbach and many others gaining prominence through film festivals and home video. Like the aforementioned filmmakers,... 

Busting

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... 

The Glass Shield: Special Edition

Charles Burnett is one of America’s most underrated filmmakers working today. Unlike his African-American contemporary, Spike Lee, he is not an outspoken personality in his own right, preferring to let the work speak for itself. In many respects, his... 

Ocean’s Twelve

With big budget, star-studded casts like the one in Ocean’s Twelve (2004), there is always the danger of having them look too smug and self-indulgent instead of having fun along with the audience. Ocean’s Eleven (2001) managed to straddle this line... 

California Split

In the 1970s, Elliott Gould and Robert Altman were an unbeatable team. The first teamed up with M*A*S*H (1970), a savage satire of the military, then worked together again on a radical contemporary reworking of Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Long Goodbye... 

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

Paul Mazursky’s directorial debut, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) is a satire of the sexual revolution in the 1960s. The film zeroes in on Hippie New Age philosophy and shows how ridiculous it is in some respects. Mazursky’s film explores... 

Little Murders

A woman named Patsy (Rodd) awakes one day to hear a commotion outside her apartment building. She exits the building and stops a gang of thugs from beating a man named Alfred (Gould). He then walks away only for the miscreants to turn on the poor woman.... 

The Long Goodbye

When The Long Goodbye was released in 1973, MGM promptly bungled its ad campaign. Robert Altman’s film radically reworked Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name and the studio had no idea how to market the offbeat movie. It polarized critics... 

Ocean’s Eleven

When it comes to crime capers there’s only one man for the job, and it doesn’t even invalidate his parole. Daz examines Ocean’s Eleven and plots a trip to Las Vegas, guess we won’t be seeing him for a few years. Over the years...