Recommended Billy Rose’s Jumbo (1962) was for many of its participants the end of the line. It was star Doris Day’s last musical, innovative choreographer-director Busby Berkeley’s last movie, and co-star Jimmy Durante’s last major film role
Highly Recommended The Movie: When Dawn Brancheau died at an Orlando, Florida SeaWorld in February 2010, Gabriela Cowperthwaite learned about the incident and the subsequent furor that came about afterwards, and was inspired to make a film surrounding the incident. What she found over the course of filming shocked the documentary filmmaker and former SeaWorld patron, and her attempts to document …
Highly Recommended The Film : Neil Jordan’s Byzantium emerges just as the recurrent vampire “craze” has started to lower back into its grave, where those popular franchises that capitalized on the trend have either wrapped up or are settling into a formulaic reputation out of the spotlight. Instead of clashing with conventions that everyone knows and relishes, this marks an ideal time for …
Highly Recommended Death Hunt (1981) was the last “serious” film of star Charles Bronson. The reliable supporting actor-turned-Euro-star found mainstream success in the U.S. with Death Wish (1974), then for the next several years mostly appeared in genre action-thrillers similar to those of box office rival Clint Eastwood
Recommended The Movie: Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1961, La Notte follows a wealthy married couple, wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) and her husband, an author named Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni), as they travel around their home city of Milan.
Highly Recommended Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) was more or less my first exposure to Japanese animation. A friend of mine, who had spent several years of his childhood in Japan, owned both domestic VHS versions of the film in the early 1990s: one was subtitled, the other was dubbed in English. Not surprisingly, the film’s mature subject matter, intense atmosphere and jaw-dropping visuals …
Highly Recommended First released in Great Britain as Expos and in the United States as Trauma , the now-titled House on Straw Hill (1976) is an extremely minor, muddled erotic thriller with slight horror movie elements, and notable only as the lone British film on the original list of “Video Nasties” compiled by the Department of Public Prosecution. Severin Films’ new Blu-ray presents it …
Recommended The Movie: For as much I have generally railed against the work of Melissa McCarthy, and think that in between her television work in Mike & Molly and her more recent movie work in Identity Thief , I just do not get or understand the reason for her success, little more than everyone gets a laugh out of watching the big girl fall down. But she comes back to one of the causes of her …
Recommended A surprisingly risqu sex farce-musical starring Danny Kaye, Gene Tierney, and Corrine Calvet, On the Riveria (1951) was the second and at times word-for-word remake of Folies Berg re de Paris (1935), which starred Maurice Chevalier, Merle Oberon, and Ann Sothern in the same parts. The first remake, made in-between, was That Night in Rio (1941), with Don Ameche, Alice Faye, and Carmen …
Recommended THE FILM Please Note: The images used here are from promotional material provided by The Cohen Media Group and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. I’m prepared to accept that smart, crowd-pleasing French filmmaker Fran ois Ozon ( 8 Women , Swimming Pool ), whose work I’ve often enjoyed and appreciated, is middlebrow, a skilled and intelligent writer/director whose …