Cinema

“Becoming Mike Nichols” an intimate portrait of the director

September 14th, 2016

Building his narrative around a pair of onstage conversations between directors and friends Mike Nichols and Jack O’Brien just four months before the death of Nichols in 2014, Douglas McGrath creates an intimate, pleasurable portrait of the early years and first two movies of the emergent filmmaker and future EGOT collector.

While several critics, including Guy Lodge in “Variety,” have cited the film’s abbreviated 72-minute length as a liability, McGrath’s sharp focus on the…

New restorations bring color back to vintage westerns

September 14th, 2016

Last month Kino Lorber released a pair of Randolph Scott westerns to Blu-ray, recently restored with some difficulty to their original Cinecolor hues. Cinecolor was a less-costly alternative to Technicolor, based upon two complementary colors instead of three primary colors. It was still relatively rare for lower-budget movies to shoot in color 65 and more years ago, and later reissues by other distributors were often in black-and-white. The camera negatives had been lost over the years…

Pioneers of African American cinema

September 7th, 2016

Race relations have been hot topics in the news lately, as have problems concerning economic class, sexual abuse, drugs, and alcohol, often all interrelated. Hollywood movies tend to avoid such themes as anything other than secondary plot points in mainstream action-adventures, except for a few instances of self-consciously serious films hoping for Academy Award recognition.

This was even more true during the heyday of the classic studio system from the 1920s through the 1940s. Seventy…

Behind the masks and under the helmets of “Star Wars”

September 7th, 2016

Jon Spira’s “Elstree 1976” rounds up a group of bit players, extras, and background performers who just happened to be part of “Star Wars” before anyone had a clue that the film would become a popular cultural juggernaut.

In the North London studio location where many sets had been constructed, some of the actors labored under the impression they were working on a minor entertainment designed for television broadcast. Others, however, grasped the possibility that George Lucas…

Women dominate two forgotten noir classics

August 31st, 2016

This past May, restorations of two long-forgotten film noir classics made their Blu-ray and DVD debut from Flicker Alley. Both films focus on strong female leading characters rather than the male detectives, gangsters, small-time crooks, and/or unwitting schlemiels who typically get lured by a scheming woman to their doom or near-destruction. The reputations of both films had suffered or been ignored over the decades due to the mediocre to poor condition copies available until recent…

Transitional horror/sci-fi new to Blu-ray

August 24th, 2016

A pair of above-average horror/sci-fi films from the fifties debuted on Blu-ray this spring, both dealing with obsessed brain surgeons, each with elements of “Frankenstein.”

Their titles and promotional material make them seem like typical drive-in filler but both are a large step above their more lurid competition. Unlike most horror/sci-fi from that decade, neither giant monsters nor invaders from another planet are to be found in either film.

One of them is a modern-day (1950s)…

Legendary movie book comes to life in documentary “Hitchcock/Truffaut”

August 24th, 2016

Finally making its way to HBO following a 2015 Cannes premiere and a festival run, Kent Jones’s “Hitchcock/Truffaut” demands attention from cinephiles of all ages. Bringing to life the 1966 book that emerged from a detailed series of face-to-face interviews conducted by Truffaut in Hollywood, Jones and co-scripter Serge Toubiana build a hagiographic monument to the filmmaker least in need of one.

Even so, Jones makes a compelling case for Hitchcock’s lasting appeal as a master…

1950s sci-fi and Cold War fears

August 17th, 2016

Last month two new Blu-ray releases featured low-budget sci-fi movies about monsters we cannot see (thus helping keep the budgets low). Neither is a “classic” but both are able to hold attention with their earnest acting that belies their budgets and rapid shooting schedules, as well as their expression of 1950s paranoias, safely and metaphorically dramatized within fictional fantasy. Both incorporate the familiar clash between scientists seeking new knowledge and military experts…

Suicide Squad: Ayer’s supervillain blitz messy and unsatisfying

August 17th, 2016

Filmmaker David Ayer’s “Fury” featured muscular action, effective use of screen space, coherent storytelling logic, and — even though we knew they were doomed from the first trailer — a ragtag group of soldiers with distinct personalities.

Not surprisingly given the nonstop tales of creative second-guessing and executive interference, virtually none of these qualities are on hand in the frustrating “Suicide Squad,” a critic-proof franchise rocket launcher affiliated with…

More noir: four Bogarts

August 10th, 2016

“The Big Sleep” (1946), Howard Hawks’ mystery-thriller starring Humphrey Bogart, is one of the best movie adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe, mainly thanks to Lauren Bacall figuring prominently in the cast and her obvious chemistry with Bogart. It’s packed with snappy, witty dialogue, sexual innuendoes with daring implications for the era (like the outrageously clever bookstore sequence), and a mystery so convoluted that the process of the investigation…

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