Blog

In The Brown Bunny (2005), a film he wrote, directed, edited, etc., Vincent Gallo stars as a motorcycle racer whose amatory attachment is to Chloe Sevigny's Daisy.  The pair being separated, the racer tracks Daisy down in Los Angeles after purposefully abandoning...

1968: a public high school in Philadelphia. This is what Frederick Wiseman, America's most famous documentary maker, trained his camera on 50 years ago, in High School.  A dandy film, it reveals perfectly the unkillable regimentation in modern schools, although the...

Gracie Allen's comedy in the 1937 A Damsel in Distress is easy to take only in small doses, which is what we get (for his part, George Burns is a zero).  Allen, at any rate, is not the movie's leading lady; Joan Fontaine is, and Fred Astaire the leading man. ...

John Schlesinger's Marathon Man (1976) is a mediocre thriller---paranoid, rambling, even silly.  Thus it is devoid of the economy and sensible content of the American crime movies of the Forties and Fifties.  Yes, those movies were usually based on novels, but so...

Weddings and Babies (1958) is, like Little Fugitive, an American independent film by Morris Engle; and, again, the setting is New York City.  A Swedish-born young woman, Bea (Viveca Lindfors), desires to be married to her photographer boyfriend, Al (John Myhers); but...

I wonder whether they'll ever make a movie about today's black-on-white violent crime, of which there is a lot.  What was made instead, though it was decades ago, was Sam Fuller's White Dog (1982), about a dog trained by a sick racist to attack black people. TV...

Harry Kleiner's screenplay for the Samuel Fuller film, House of Bamboo (1955), consists of too many coincidences for the plot to hold up well, but it's interesting to see American gangsters in Tokyo (post-WWII).  What they're doing is robbing U.S. ammunition trains,...

Flecks of disrespect toward people who profess to be Christians are found in some of Sam Peckinpah's movies (The Deadly Companions, Ride the High Country), and clearly Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) is no exception.  (I'll give Straw Dogs a pass; it's...

A nice scene in Bright Star (2009), by Jane Campion, has the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) choosing to knock on a wall behind which is the bedroom of Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), who hears the knock.  Then Fanny herself, drawn to Keats, knocks back, with no other...