Blog

When the great Sidney Poitier died in January, there was much talk about In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Lilies of the Field, all of his most well-known films, but I also heard about this film for the first time, Buck and the Preacher, a western…

As any great creative artist moves from flesh and blood to myth, the great works tend to get discussed ad nauseum, the minor works forgotten or relegated to footnotes of footnotes.

But sometimes these footnotes…

Near the beginning of this year, I was finally able to see Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s much-acclaimed new film, Drive My Car. The heaps of critical praise it has been given are well deserved and I don’t hesitate to add my own laudatory comments, for whatever they’re worth. One of the key elements of the story that struck me is the relationship between a middle-aged theatrical director and his driver, an adult woman maybe twenty years his junior. Almost uniquely in the history of movies, the scenes…

Robin and the 7 Hoods is the final Rat Pack movie, it is a movie starring Frank Sinatra, it is a musical, it is a comedy updating of Robin Hood, it is all of these things, but can you guess which of these facts is the reason I saw this movie?

If you answered none of the above, you are correct, because the actual reason is…

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…