While helping Mel Brooks put the finishing touches on the classic Young Frankenstein, Gene Wilder was offered the opportunity to write and direct his first feature film. The result was the bizarre, yet funny The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter…
Since his death this past August at age 83, I’ve found myself revisiting the filmography of actor/writer/director Gene Wilder. I grew up adoring him for his signature role, that of of Willy Wonka in the first film adaption of Roald…
October 29, 1964—just eight months after The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, television director Steve Binder was given the task of staging the Teen-Age Music International Show (The T.A.M.I. Show), a concert that captured twelve of the biggest…
Though Paramount released a barebones Blu-ray of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood back in 2015, Criterion’s newly released Blu-ray, with a new 2K digital transfer supervised by Linklater himself and an impressive selection of extras about the film, is well worth the…
Produced two years earlier, it’s impossible not to think of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes while watching Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich. This doesn’t come as a surprise when you consider that both films were adapted from novels by…
Every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, three movies will show up somewhere, sometime on television: A Christmas Carol (of which there are several good versions), A Christmas Story and It’s A Wonderful Life. After its copyright was inexplicably not renewed…
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon is probably not one of director John Ford’s finest films, but it’s among his most beloved. The second of the unofficial “Cavalry Trilogy” between Fort Apache and Rio Grande, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon was…
Over a career spanning six decades and more than forty-five films, Woody Allen has undoubtedly seen and learned a lot about Hollywood, movies and the glitz that surrounds it. Now in his eighties, Allen no longer stars in his films,…
Per its tagline, “This is not a sequel. There has never been anything like it. Before watching Russ Myers’ Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (BVD), put aside anything you know, love or hate about the 1967 film Valley of…
Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) wanted nothing more for his sixth birthday than a large-sized, talking “Good Guy” doll. But widowed working mom Karen (Catherine Hicks) didn’t have enough advanced notice of her son’s birthday wish to save the $100 dollars…