Highly Recommended THE MOVIE: My first encounter with The Big Country was a couple of years ago. I wasn’t familiar with William Wyler’s 1958 film until George Clooney was talking about how he borrowed a scene from it for Leatherheads .
Recommended THE MOVIE: On the way out of my first viewing of Mateo Gil’s Blackthorn , I overheard someone calling it a “standard Western”–as if that would be a bad thing, if there were any such thing anymore. Making a Western these days is anything but standard; they’re enough of a novelty that it’s still worth being thankful when we get one, and not dismissing it for being less than a …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are promotional stills and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. There is a scene in Godard’s turning-point 1965 film Pierrot le fou in which stars Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo perform an impromptu “play” for American tourists in which an event as vast, urgent, and serious as the Vietnam War–including all its …
Recommended It never fails – You give a television network pure gold, and they’ll beat it and roll it around in the mud before you ever had a chance to realize what was happening to it. Instead of looking at the quality of any given program, network executives would rather comb feverishly through their charts, graphs and reams of statistical data, and in pondering how much blood they might be …