Shot on location in Mexico, 1954’s Vera Cruz was a new kind of western for the time. Filmed in Superscope, featuring sweeping landscapes, and multiple gun battles, and stars Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, rarely has a films tagline—“The Giants…
A glossy rendition of Eduardo De Filippo’s Neapolitan play Filumena Marturano, Marriage Italian Style is a comedic drama about the highs and lows of a lifelong romance. Starring the perpetually stunning Sophia Loren, and the “man’s man” Marcello Mastroianni, the…
If you’re looking for a bit of escapist entertainment, The Company Men certainly isn’t it. Writer/director John Wells pulls few punches: a large shipping company as they lay off scores of employees as a cost cutting measure. he film follows…
Clint Eastwood’s fifth film as a director, The Outlaw Josey Wales derived from the novel Gone to Texas by Forrest Carter, is one of Eastwood’s best early westerns. Armed with a screenplay by Sonia Chernus and Philip Kaufman, and music…
Written and directed by Nicolas Roeg, and adapted from a Terry Johnson play, Insignificance satirizes some of pop culture’s brightest stars of the 1950’s. The year is 1954. It’s a hot and steamy night in New York City, and Marilyn…
Most of the time I detest remakes; however, True Grit proves they don’t have to be bad. The Coen Brothers’ interpretation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel is superior in almost every way to the 1969 Henry Hathaway version. While…
In a filmmaking career that spanned over fifty years, Stanley Kubrick had a fondness for taking the novels of others and reshaping them to fit his own vision. Of the 16 movies Kubrick directed (including his final film, Eyes Wide…
Drive Angry is best described as an absurd comic book comic book come to life. Both a homage to, and parody of ’70s exploitation films, Drive Angry shifts into high gear and never slows down. Using the loose framework of…
Not a box office hit when first released, in the nearly fifty years since, The Manchurian Candidate has taken its place among the greatest espionage films ever made. While The Manchurian Candidate seemed to foreshadow much of the political and…
Goodness knows Hollywood has produced plenty of films claiming to be based on true events—The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror fall under that heading. The Rite is the latest member of the group. However, the filmmakers want us to take…