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Last year, when I was doing my 365 Films in 365 Days Project, I started doing little tributes when people died. I would watch and review a film of the decedent, preferably one that I had never seen before like O’Hara‘s Wife for Ed Asner, although sometimes it would be a film that I just adored and hadn’t seen in years, like Heaven Can Wait for Charles Grodin.

Well, there were so many deaths in January 2022, that I decided to do a subsection of these reviews, and I’m calling it Passings.

I am not doing them in order of said passing, and thus am starting with the most recent, Howard Hesseman, who died last week. Now, he didn’t do tons of films…

Almost any conversation about movies will eventually find its way into a game of comparisons: “What’s the best fight scene?” “Best documentary?” “Best Nicolas Cage movie?” (The correct answers to those questions are, of course, all of The Raid: Redemption, Hands on a Hardbody, and Raising Arizona. Direct any complaints to the editor.) Now suppose you were asked the question, “What movie has the best opening?” For me, the answer is immediate – Sullivan’s Travels. The first seven minutes…

We recently screened two of mercurial filmmaker Sam Peckinpah’s greatest movies: The Wild Bunch (usually cited as his masterpiece) and the unsettling Dustin Hoffman starring home invasion movie Straw Dogs.

Watching the movies, I was struck by several things.

One-Sam Peckinpah and his editors cut some of the best edited American sequences of the last sixty years.

Two-Sam Peckinpah is a filmmaker of both problematic and perfect sequences.

Three-Peckinpah’s explorations into the nature of violence…

Happy New Year! Yeah, I know it’s February, but I took January off, so this is my first 2022 post, so I’m allowed to say happy new year to you, I’m grandfathered in.

Cinematic Void via the American Cinemateque currently residing at the Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles does a great annual Giallo January, and I’m both a big Giallo fan and also haven’t seen that many films, so I went to all but one, and the last one was this pretty rare film…

Fred Rogers once remarked, “I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential

than shallow and complex.” Throughout film history…

I’ve always wavered on weather the term “character actor” is the highest compliment or a kind of back-handed misunderstanding of some of moviedom’s greatest talents.

Gene Hackman once said something to the effect that he much preferred…

His name most likely won’t ring a bell and even seeing his face in the accompanying photograph here might not help, either. Wesley Addy never played the lead in any of the twenty feature films in which he appeared between 1955 and 1996, including some well-known titles such as Kiss Me Deadly, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and The Verdict. His career, which also encompasses decades on the stage and dozens of television roles, has him frequently lodged at a third or fourth billing tier.

His name isn’t typically…

This week, we kick off our John Ford Director of 2022 series with Fort Apache (1948), The Informer (1935), and The Fugitive (1947).

In that interesting way the subconscious works, we didn’t realize this when we programmed this week but all three movies center around…

As one of the standard-bearers of the Romanian New Wave, writer-director Radu Jude, has been key in the creation of several of the most interesting films of the last fifteen years or so. It’s entirely unsurprising that one his first jobs was as an assistant director for The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, certainly among the most well-received films of that movement and, arguably, of the best of this still young century. Though he achieved notice for his first short film, the neorealism influenced…

Because the history of the Motion Picture Production Code has been well-covered many times over in the nebulous elsewhere, the following summary of the same here is purposefully brief but, I think, necessary to put the delightfully odd film, The Sin of Nora Moran, into some kind of context.

Briefly, a groundswell of moral panic toward Hollywood films (and personalities) of the late 1920s bred the formation of a self-regulated agency to impose restrictions on what could and, more significantly, could not be shown on cinema screens. The post-silent years before the strictures were firmly cemented is generally known as the Pre-Code Era. In this era, movies began tackling more controversial subject matter and, consequently, stretching out in their storytelling. Villains didn’t always die at the end and sometimes terrible things happened to undeserving people. Et cetera, et cetera. A counterpoint might validly contend that Hollywood was slavishly embracing ever more lurid elements to pander to their paying audiences.

The Sin of Nora Moran materializes in 1933, a breath away…