Category: Reviews – Blog Only

With The Funeral, Abel Ferrara revisits many of his trademark obsessions – madness, honor, duty, loyalty, sexual dysfunction, and Catholic guilt and repentance – via the flashback-heavy story of the funeral of communist gangster Johnny Tempio (Vincent Gallo) at the house of his mob boss brother Ray (Christopher Walken). It’s a psychologically strung-out tale stuffed…

Even a minor Robert Altman effort is superior to most current moviemakers’ finest works, a fact confirmed by A Prairie Home Companion, the director’s touching (if a tad slight) musical-comedy tale of the (fictional) final performance of NPR stalwart Garrison Keillor’s titular stagebound radio show. Like Keillor, Altman is a born storyteller with a fundamental…

War vet Leon “Foggy” Poole (Wendell Corey, masking malevolence underneath meekness) plans a bank heist that goes awry; during the ensuing attempt to arrest him, detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotton) accidentally kills Poole’s wife. Years later, Poole escapes prison, intent on exacting tit-for-tat revenge by killing Wagner’s spouse (Rhonda Fleming). Budd Boetticher’s The Killer is…

His plans for a straight-and-narrow life undone by three escaped convicts (including Charles Bronson, né Charles Buchinsky) who appear on his doorstep in need of a hideout, ex-con Steve Lacy (Gene Nelson) finds himself at the center of a tug-of-war between his former criminal compadres and Sterling Hayden’s determined detective in André De Toth’s neorealist…

Flippantly derided upon its initial release as an indulgent failure, Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game (aka Snake Eyes) is the director’s most overtly Godard-ian effort, an examination of filmmaking and family – and their intrinsic relationship – that self-consciously revels in ambiguity, contradiction and artifice. It’s also, one might add, one of his most rewardingly challenging…

Joseph H. Lewis delivers Hitchcockian suspense and some menacing Gothic ambiance with My Name is Julia Ross, a paranoia-drenched tale of conspiratorial deceit and madness set in an ominous seaside mansion. Nina Foch’s titular out-of-work heroine, having seemingly missed her opportunity for a life of comfort and leisure when she allowed engaged housemate Dennis (Roland…

Tediously trudging through Oedipal territory, Rudolph Maté’s The Dark Past is yet another of the era’s barely tolerable advertisements for Freudian psychoanalysis that’s undone by a heaping of dramatically inert exposition. Escaped convict Al Walker (William Holden) takes a family hostage, only to discover that the man of the house, Dr. Andrew Collins (Lee J.…

Recycling Maniac Cop’s slasher flick formula for anti-war satire, director William Lustig and screenwriter Larry Cohen unearth the grotesque underbelly of Fourth of July jingoism with Uncle Sam. The corpse of chopper pilot Sam Harper – burnt to a crisp during the first Gulf War – is returned home to small town U.S.A, where the…

Aspiring photographer Jack Early (Howard Duff) so desperately craves success that, like a modern-day Yojimbo, he pits two rival crime bosses against one another in an elaborate scheme designed to catapult him to the top of the journalistic food chain. Alas, Early is such a smug little twit that it’s difficult not to wholeheartedly root…

Bodyguard begins with Lawrence Tierney delivering one crackerjack line after another – the best of which is his calling an interfering butler “Dracula” – but ends in pure tedium, its 62-minute running time feeling more like three hours. Featuring a story by 23-year-old Robert Altman, Richard Fleischer’s succinct noir finds Tierney’s insubordinate cop Mike Carter…