DVD review: ‘West of Broadway’ A few years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine this 1931 MGM film ever coming to home video. Gilbert is known as the greatest casualty of the transition to sound, and it’s true, and yet I have always preferred his wry, wistful, proud talkie persona to his dashing silent incarnation.
DVD review: ‘Weekend’ of your opinion of his later work, “Weekend,” his 15th feature in nine years, was the last film of the first stage of his career, which began with 1959’s “Breathless” and produced most of his best-known works (“Contempt,” “Vivre sa vie,” “Alphaville,” “Band of Outsiders,” etc.). Featuring a set-piece of cinematic legend – a lengthy traffic jam sequence that goes for …
In the first minutes of a quick sitdown with Dustin Hoffman, the sprightly icon of 20th-century cinema – The Graduate, Marathon Man, Kramer vs. Kramer, All the President’s Men, Midnight Cowboy, Rain Man, Tootsie (come on, this is ridiculous!) – manages to reference Ireland, James Joyce, Ulysses, waiting tables, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and tortoise- shell glasses.
Hollywood’s myth-making machine never lets facts get in the way of a good story
A hymn to adolescent self-absorption, Ol Parker’s Now Is Good stars Dakota Fanning as a teenage girl with one of those rare strains of terminal cancer which don’t make you look unhealthy.
DVD rental firm Blockbuster has announced plans to close 23 stores in Scotland with the loss of around 100 jobs as part of a phased Âclosure across the UK over the coming weeks.
One of the best things about growing up Roces was having our own cinema, the Ideal, exclusive Philippine exhibitors of MGM (Metro Goldwyn Mayer) movies. Among the thrills it gave me and my cousins, aside from the obvious one of getting to watch movies for free, was meeting the likes of Charlton Heston, the epic star (“The Ten Commandments,†“Ben-Hurâ€), and the debonair Ricardo Montalban.
Samurai films aren’t always bloody action thrillers.
New DVDs from VCI Entertainment resurrect the films of the British comedians Will Hay and Norman Wisdom.
Highly Recommended A pretty good B-Western featuring John Wayne, very early in his starring career, The New Frontier (1935) breaks no new ground but is well made for its budget level. Indeed, it’s fairly lavish by Republic Pictures’ standards, the studio then just getting started itself, the company having been founded earlier that year when Consolidated Film Laboratories president Herbert J …