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A 1962 picture from France, Love on a Pillow is about self-destruction in the blood, and the far-reaching effect of erotic love.  Genevieve (Brigitte Bardot) discovers a man who is attempting suicide and saves his life, later joining him in an amatory relationship. ...

If Spike Lee wants to make a film about the not-yet-obliterated racism of past decades, that's fine, but he needs to do it without utter agitprop.  Agitprop has no place in art. Except for Kyle Smith, the critics drooled over BlacKkKlansman (2018); but Smith was right...

Harold Lloyd knew how to play an innocent, as in The Cat's Paw (1934), and here he is the son of a missionary in China, one wishing to perpetuate his father's work by returning to Stockport, California, the place of his birth, in order to marry and produce offspring. ...

Herein, Tippi Hedren plays a practical joker who finds out, of course, that life is no joke.  The birds in Bodega Bay have gone insane, psychopathic, vicious.  Relationship problems pale in significance when the avian attacks begin.  One wonders why Tippi and Rod...

I have seen the first two episodes of the new Netflix series, The Umbrella Academy.  We need another visual narrative about X Men-like superheroes like we need Jussie Smollett giving campus lectures on the subject of hate crimes.  The action scenes have been fun, but...

Directed by Ivan Passer, Born to Win (1971) presents us with J. (George Segal), a drug addict who considers himself . . . born to win, which actually means born to get the fix he needs.  Only he usually doesn't.  What he does is fall in love with Parm (Karen Black),...

It is after a talk with a psychoanalyst that Jill (Merle Oberon) develops an uncertain feeling about her marriage to Larry (Melvyn Douglas)---this in the film, That Uncertain Feeling (1941), by Ernst Lubitsch---and she starts pulling away from him.  But Jill's...

Larry Peerce's Goodbye Columbus (1969) is a Hollywood movie for adults since the Philip Roth story from which it derives is a novella for adults.  It is well known that it has to do with the attitude of rich American Jews toward low-income Jews (and vice versa), but...

Thanks to YouTube I was able to see a film by the French director Claude Autant-Lara other than his mediocre Sylvie and the Phantom, the film being the 1958 Love is My Profession, or---a far preferable title---In Case of Adversity. Bit by bit corruption gathers in a...