Only Peckinpah's second film, but arguably his best one, made in his mid-thirties, and already "autumnal" in outlook: two retired lawmen (gift roles for the well-deserving Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea) trying with different degrees of desperation to hang on to their dignity in the fading frontier. It's all rather …
Harper Lee's nostalgic novel, a junior-high-school favorite, about growing up in smalltown Alabama, and about the lessons learned along the way, gets a slick and overstressed treatment from Robert Mulligan. The episodic narrative, which takes its time and varies its moods, has a serialized quality, and some of the installments, …
Harper Lee's nostalgic novel, a junior-high-school favorite, about growing up in smalltown Alabama, and about the lessons learned along the way, gets a slick and overstressed treatment from Robert Mulligan. The episodic narrative, which takes its time and varies its moods, has a serialized quality, and some of the installments, …
Orson Welles's heavy concretization of Franz Kafka's paranoid nightmare: the faceless "K" materializes as a skittishly mannered Tony Perkins, and most of the puzzling quality is pinned down definitively in the archaic Expressionistic shadows, the elaborately charted camera movement, and the disembodied dubbed voices (to which Welles himself contributed roughly …
For director Vincente Minnelli, writer Charles Schnee, producer John Houseman, and star Kirk Douglas, a ten-years-after followup to their The Bad and the Beautiful (footage from which goes into the film-within-the-film). It's a bit strained, a bit borderline-hysterical; and perhaps the changes in the film industry over a decade, the …
Robert Aldrich's clever, perverse, and lethally venomous valentine to Old Hollywood, filmed in Rudolph Valentino's baroque former residence, where two retired show-biz sisters are shut away in a demented battle of egos. For this intoxicating mixture of has-been, might-have-been, and still-could-be dreams of stardom, the casting of Bette Davis, sadist, …
An Ingmar Bergman movie of enormous suffering, spiritual and physical, set in a bleak provincial Swedish winter. A faithless pastor can extend no consolation to his flock, specifically to the lonely schoolteacher who adores him and to the simple fisherman who lives in consuming dread of what the Chinese will …
Akira Kurosawa's bloody-minded political parable about the struggle for supremacy in a godforsaken 17th-century rural village. The feudists on both sides are uniformly petty, pea-brained, and baboonish (the only thing protecting them from one another is their cowardice), and justice is done when an unemployed samurai wanders into their midst …