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This slow-moving but intense, stylish, visually sumptuous political thriller directed by Alan Pakula (best known for Klute, All the Presients Men, and and Sophie's Choice) somehow combines a preternatural clarity with a misty dissonance: it's like someone shattered the 1960s political assassinations and jumbled them together into a dream. Warren Beatty is great as the callow but dedicated reporter whose curiosity gets him in waters farther over his head (on some occasions literally) than he could have imagined. Several of the film's aspects are, and are probably intended to be, reminiscent of Hitchcock: the way things and people are not as they seem, and a final explosion of menace in the cheerful public environment of a political rally. One of the key films in the political conspiracy theory genre.

This justly famous film by Alan Pakula (The Parallax View, Sophie's Choice, All the President's men) ostensibly starring a very young Donald Sutherland as a small town cop turned private investigator who searches for a missing friend in big bad NYC would have qualified as a well-made but standard hard-boiled mystery if it were not for the stellar performance of Jane Fonda as the call girl whose help he enlists for his search, which lifts it into the category of a classic: rarely in film has a performance let us know a character so thoroughly. Advisory: drug use and language, scary but not too graphic violence, sex rather restrained by current standards.

One of the best political thrillers and one of Brian de Palma's best films, Blow Out features John Travolta in top notch performance as a sound engineer for an independent film making company in Philadelphia which specializes in cheesy soft-porn/slasher films: while out recording night sounds on a creekside for his audio library he sees a car plunge into the water and dives in to save the female passenger but too late to save the male driver, who turns out to be a leading candidate for the US presidency. Later, he realizes from the sounds he recorded that the blow out which caused the accident was caused by a gunshot, something which understandably the powers that be don't want known.

Nancy Allen's deliberately flighty performance as the rescued woman provides a perfect foil to Travolta's solidness, and the convoluted plot unfolds through both obvious and subtle allusions to historical events (Chappaquiddick, Dallas) and classic cinema (the title's resemblance to Blow Up is not accidental, and the scenes of mayhem in public venues like a large train station or a patriotic fireworks display where the crowds have no idea what's happening are very Hitchcockian.) Rated R for elements which don't seem all that shocking today. An extremely interesting film. The Criterion special edition DVD is as good as you would expect.

Confidential Agent is a rather neglected film: it seems to be listed in very few film reference books, presumably because it was out of circulation for a long time. The story, from a book by Graham Greene, concerns a Spanish pianist turned anti-Fascist soldier in the Spanish Civil War (Charles Boyer) who comes to England on a secret mission to buy up a huge supply of coal with the dual purpose of using it to support the Republican side and denying it to Franco's forces; he's assisted by a spoiled rich girl he runs into (Lauren Bacall) who also falls in love with him.

It's easy to see what Warner's was hoping for from this film: by co-starring a solidly established male romantic lead (Boyer) with the hot new female sex symbol (Bacall, fresh from her sensation-making role with Bogart in The Big Sleep the previous year) in a patriotically anti-Fascist story while the war was still in progress, the studio might seem to have had all the bases covered. But in fact, the film is a very mixed bag.

On the negative side, Boyer struggles manfully with his role but never seems to really get inside his character. Bacall seems to be trying to portray a femme fatale of the sexy but ice-cold variety, but her performance (which the critics generally panned) comes off as just being wooden. And there's a complete lack of real chemistry between the two. The film also has a strained Hollywood happy ending, which seems tacked on.

But there are some virtues to set against this. The script is generally intelligent, and the complicated plot consistently clear. Several of the minor performances are memorable, especially Ian Wolfe and Dan Seymour as two quite different but equally amusing eccentrics, Peter Lorre is fine as his usual sniveling villain and Katina Paxou is excellent as the so-evil-she's-insane murderess. The best thing about the film, though, is the starkly noirish photography by great cinematographer James Wong Howe: those seriously interested in the art of cinema lighting will find much to admire.

All in all, not a classic, but worth seeing for its good points.

Perhaps this film has been largely forgotten because it's usually marketed (if you can find it at all -- I saw it in a region 1 DVD from Warners Home Video in an adequate but not great print/transfer) as a 3 Stooges film, but in fact The Boyz play only a minor supporting role. The film in fact is a much classier production than the later Stooges features, with a screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz, whose other scripting credits include Dinner at Eight and Citizen Kane, and songs by Dorothy Fields, one of the all time great popular songwriters who wrote or co-wrote classics like I Can't Give You Anything But Love, On The Sunny Side of the Street, and The Way You Look Tonight.

The ostensible lead is Jack Pearl, reprising his radio-show characterization of the folk hero Baron Munchausen -- the show made a national catch-phrase of Pearl's trademark query, "Vas you dere, Sharley?" which is of course worked into the movie. But the show is totally stolen by a startlingly young Jimmy Durante, whose speech is one long rapid-fire stream of malapropisms, and who in one great scene is asleep snoring: "Hot cha-a-a-ah! Hot-cha-a-a-ah!" The plot is too silly and irrelevant to need summarizing, having something to do with the real Baron deserting Pearl and Durante in the wilds of Africa, after which Pearl travels to America where he gains fame and fortune by impersonating the Baron, which results in an invitation to lecture at the all-female Cuddle College, a venue which provides the opportunity for several girls' dormitory bevy-of-beauties musical numbers a la Busby Berkeley. Edna May Oliver, veteran of a million character roles, is the no-nonsense Dean. The script is almost composed of a series of outrageously and deliberately bad jokes slapstick, sometimes veering into the surreal, reminiscent of the Marx Brothers' antics in Duck Soup.

All in all, a delightful, outrageous 1930s confection which deserves to be better known.

Nobody seems to understand this movie.

Howard Hawks's screwball comedy starring Rock Hudson as a supposed professional expert on sports fishing who actually knows nothing about it, and Paula Prentiss as the woman who helps him get through a fishing contest despite his ignorance, is perhaps the most amazing cinematic study in symbolic sex I can think of, though the symbolism is so naturally integrated into the action that the censors can't touch it.

Almost every scene involves a woman or women getting a man (Rock Hudson) into something he can't get out of.

It begins with Hudson inserting himself into Prentiss's car and almost not getting out of it, incidentally dropping his ID into the car next to her ID (!), and it turns out she's also gotten him into getting a ticket, which he can't get out of.

Then he finds she's gotten him into entering the fishing tournament, which he can't get out of.

Later she makes him fall into the lake, which he can't get out of, and then she tells him to inflate the gaiters, which he does but they inflate up too much (!) and he can't get out of them.

And she puts his arm into a cast which he can't get out of, so he has to walk around with his arm sticking stiffly up (!) until she finally cuts off the cast (yes, there's a lot of castration imagery too.) And she causes him to sleep on the couch in a sleeping bag, which he subsequently can't get out of, causing him to get in trouble with his fiancée Tex, which he can't get out of.

These are only a few of the more memorable scenes of "female traps male," which are all symbolic of male ambivalence towards the sex act: desire to consummate and dread of being consumed.

I haven't even mentioned the male sexual imagery associated with fish, but if you watch the film with that in mind, you'll see it everywhere. Just one example is the fishing contest, in which men are judged by the size of their "trophies": "Mine is bigger than yours: I'm the better man!" And there's some fascinating symbolism in the early scenes in the Abercrombie and Fitch offices, where Hudson and the other men are positioned in front of the various antlered hunting trophies on the walls in such a way that they seem to have horns themselves, foreshadowing, I think, the motif of women manipulating men through male "animal impulses." (I probably can't even explain the symbolism of Hudson getting his tie caught in the zipper of another woman's dress and then being led all around by it without getting this review censored.) About now many reading this are saying, This is a joke, right? and are preparing to post mocking replies saying "Yeah, sure, and I suppose all those fishing rods are also sex symbols ..." (Well, yes, actually.) My only defense is to remind everyone that Hawks was one of cinema's supreme geniuses: not even Hitchcock makes his sexual symbolism (which is universally agreed to be there) so natural and unobtrusive. The ultimate test will be to watch the movie again with some of these things in mind: even if you're skeptical now, I bet you won't be able to help feeling there's something to this. Meanwhile, feel free to post your scorn.

(And I'm not saying everything in this movie is a sexual symbol. Probably not the credits, for instance ...)

This greatest of Westerns and most American of all films is so famous as to hardly need a formal review as a movie, and at any rate discussion of it is easily found in countless printed and on line sources. For those who've never seen it, I'll only say that this 1948 Howard Hawks epic of John Wayne, with his adopted son Montgomery Clift and sidekick Walter Brennan undertaking the first major cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail is one of those supreme classics, like Hitchcock's Vertigo or Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, which is as appealing as entertainment for a general audience as it is impressive as a work of art to critics. It's also undoubtedly John Wayne's best role -- reportedly John Ford upon seeing it exclaimed, "I didn't know the son of a ----- could act!" Noted film critic David Thomson has written that this is his favorite movie.

The film can be found on various DVDs and collections, of which the 2014 Criterion set is by far the one to prefer.

Black Magic is an unjustly neglected 1949 Orson Welles film, based on Alexandre Dumas's novel Joseph Balsamo, a fictionalized version of the life of the occultist better known as Cagliostro, set mostly against the background of the days just before the French Revolution. The film is entertaining and well done, though it's a pity that it's in black and white, since the meticulously recreated ancien regime sets and costumes would have looked much more impressive in color. Welles reportedly said that he had more fun making this film than any other, and it's easy to see why, since the melodramatic script gives ample room for over-the-top histrionics, which only an actor of Welles's talent could put over convincingly. It's interesting that Welles here again plays an eccentric genius whose early success was soon undermined by his own flaws -- in other words, a character whose career is intriguingly parallel to his own. I think most people will find the film entertaining, and real Welles fans should consider it a must-see.

The Hen's Tooth Video DVD seems to be the only Region 1 DVD currently available, and it's of adequate sound and image quality, though from a rather poor original print. The film is certainly important enough to deserve a redigitized version with booklet and special features, if possible from a better print, but lacking that, the Hen's Tooth Video version is watchable.

This is a film version of an early 1960s Sondheim Broadway musical with some members of the theatrical production. The story, concerning the machinations of a clever slave (Zero Mostel) manipulating his master, household, and neighbors in a plan to gain his freedom, is based on an ancient Latin comedy by Plautus. Phil Silvers as a procurer and Leon Greene as a bombastic Roman conqueror are standouts -- the latter's narcissistic introductory aria is, I think, a high point.

The film has gotten mixed reviews: some don't like that many songs from the musical were left out of the movie; others have considered Lester's slapstick comic style, while vigorous, to lack depth. But the film, while not a great classic, is undoubtedly entertaining, and fans of the Classics or of things Roman will have fun seeing how the Plautine background is used.

I found the Kino Lorber Blu-Ray DVD faintly disappointing: there's nothing wrong with it, but it seemed to lack the surprisingly vivid and deep images that a good Blu-Ray can bring you. Maybe they needed a better original print. I haven't seen a standard DVD version of this, though, so I don't have a basis for comparison.

On the Riviera is the third film made from a stage play called The Red Cat, the other two being L'homme des Folies Bergère (1935) with Maurice Chevalier and That Night in Rio (1941) with Don Ameche. The plot is an example of a genre that goes right back to Plautus and Shakespeare: the comedy and confusion that result when two people who happen to look identical keep getting mistaken for each other. In this case, the two people (both played by Danny Kaye) are a famous French transatlantic aviator and an American entertainer playing a club on the French Riviera. This seems like a very obscure film: it's not found in any of the half-dozen standard film guides I happen to have, though it's in IMDb.

The film, directed by Hollywood workmanlike director Walter Lang (who made a number of other 50s musicals, like this one now mostly forgotten,) is a semi-musical; that is, there are plenty of song and dance numbers, but they are all stage performances. The most interesting aspect of the film is its display of Kaye's multiple talents as a singer, dancer, comic and impressionist -- he's the sort of performer popular in the thirties through early sixties, but now seems an almost extinct species.

The film is an interesting period piece for its sumptuous female fashions and as an early example of what would become mainstream American Hollywood musical entertainment, and if you are interested in those topics, or in Kaye, this will be worth watching. Others may find it only moderately entertaining. There is some impressive landscape photography of the Riviera, though Hitchcock did this better in To Catch a Thief.

The 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Blu-Ray DVD is of good audio and video quality.

If you're a fan of action thrillers, the name Jason Statham on a movie tells you pretty much all you need to know: there will be a loner good-bad guy hero who gets involved in a complex criminal or espionage scheme, during the course of which trying to rescue someone or doing a necessary job he fights his way through various locations, dispatching an endless series of villains with his bare hands (and sometimes feet and head too) and various weapons, usually ending up doing the action hero equivalent of riding off into the sunset.

Safe follows the formula. The plot here concerns an 11 year old Chinese girl math prodigy who is kidnapped in China by a Triad who want to exploit her amazing ability to remember numbers for their own evil ends; they send her to New York where she draws the additional nefarious attentions of the Russian Mafia and a cabal of corrupt cops, from all of whom she is rescued by guess who.

I thought this was a better than average example of the genre. Catherine Chan does a good job as the child math prodigy, wisely underplaying her role, and the contrasting locales in China and various NYC environments add visual interest. If you're a fan of the genre, I think you'll like this one. If you haven't seen any action thrillers and want to try one out, this one might be a good choice. If you don't care for the genre, you'll probably want to skip it. My three star rating is based on how attractive I think the film would be to a general audience; if you're a fan of the genre, give it four stars.

Advisory: rated R, which I thought was rather surprising, since there's not much sex, language is fairly mild by current standards, and the violence, though pervasive, is not especially gory: as often, there is a certain video game quality to the series of bad guys getting blasted bam-bam-bam. I saw this on the Lion's Gate Region 1 Blu-Ray, which was of very good quality.

A. J. Raffles, "the amateur cracksman," was a fictional English gentleman safecracker invented by E. W. Hornung in a series of stories beginning in 1898 as a sort of mirror image of Sherlock Holmes. Like Holmes, Raffles is a suave, upper-class intellectual involved with the underworld, but Raffles's involvement is on the wrong side of the law: he supports his upper-class lifestyle by his career as a jewellry thief.

The Raffles stories were extremely popular and have been the subject of many film, theater, and television treatments. One of the best of these is this 1930, very early talkie starring cinema's quintessential English gentleman, Ronald Coleman. It's really quite a good film for its time, with an intelligent script, generally good acting (especially by Coleman and character actor Frederick Kerr, better known as Baron Frankenstein in James Whale's famous 1931 treatment of the monster story, who steals every scene he is in as a grouchy English lord.) Co-cinematographer Gregg Toland, who later worked on many Hollywood classics, is presumably responsible for the film's noirish, atmospheric lighting effects.

All in all, I'd say this entertaining film will still be enjoyed by today's audiences, and is a must see for fans of Coleman.

In The Woman in Green, London is being terrorized by a series of murders of young women which have only one thing in common: each victim's index finger is neatly cut off. Scotland Yard, as usual, is baffled, and, as usual, turns in desperation to Sherlock Holmes.

Though a rather late entry in a series which many feel lapsed in quality through time, The Woman in Green is actually one of the better movies in the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes series. Though Holmes's usual police liaison Lestrade is here replaced by the slightly less bumbling Gregson, all of the other expected elements are firmly in place. As with most of the series (except for the initial two, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), this film is set in a sort of combination dream period which is half Victorian and half mid-20th century. The flat at 221B Baker Street is particularly atmospheric and Victorian, perhaps in deliberate contrast to the chic modern flat of femme fatale Lydia Marlowe (Hilary Brooke,) where much of the action takes place.

Several things make this film stand out in the series. The puzzle of the murders connected only by a gruesome detail, while so far as I can remember not drawn from any actual Holmes story, has a genuinely Holmesian feel. Bruce's Watson is particularly endearing in his fumbling assistance, and though this is not one of Rathbone's best portrayals of Holmes -- one gets the feeling he's starting to go through the motions this late in the game -- his characterization benefits greatly by for once having a really effective feminine foil: Hilary Brooke as the evil, sophisticated blonde mesmerist proves a credible enemy. Henry Daniell is also very good as a particularly reptilian Moriarty.

The photography is also noteworthy here. The spookiness of the film's theme of hypnotism is reflected in dark lighting and tilted camera angles which almost make The Woman in Green into an expressionist noir film.

In a nutshell: if you like this series, you are sure to enjoy this film for its combination of elements which you expect in this series with surprising and effective innovations.

The Flame and the Arrow is a classic Saturday matinée swashbuckler that doesn't try or pretend to be anything else, and as such it's one of the best of its genre. This 1950 technicolor feature rises above B status because of its incisive direction by Jacques Tourneur, a veteran Hollywood genre film maker best remembered for the noir classic Out of the Past and the horror classic Cat People, and also because of the spectacular athletics of an astonishingly youthful Burt Lancaster.

There's also an effective sound track by major film composers Max Steiner; Virginia Mayo as the love interest stands around very prettily, which is about all you expect the female love interest in a movie like this to do. It's the sort of film you might have thought was the best movie ever made when you were fifteen years old, and can still enjoy fifty years later. It's available in various DVD releases; I saw it on the Turner Classics DVD, which was an OK transfer of a rather muddy print; this film should really be remastered and put on Blu-Ray.

One of Woody Allen's best films, Radio Days is a lovingly detailed and authentic portrait of a 1940s childhood in Rockaway Beach, NY, cleverly built around memories of the popular music of the day, which was universally listened to on the radio. The conceit works, and the result is one of Allen's least neurotic, least pretentious, and funniest works. It's interesting that it's a thoroughly Woody Allen movie in which Allen doesn't actually appear, though he does a running voice-over. I'd recommend it even to people who don't usually like Allen movies. The MGM DVD is of good quality; no particular advisories, except for some brief mild nudity.

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams is a melding of autobiography, zen philosophy, Noh drama, Japanese folklore, and modern anxieties about nuclear and ecological doom. It is a masterpiece by a genius director, and one of cinema's great studies in color (comparable only so far as I can think of to two much happier films, Renoir's French Cancan and Minelli's An American in Paris.) Some people have complained about the film's long periods of little or no action, an apparently simplistic morality, inaccurate science, non-realistic dance sequences, and obviously artificial special effects, not understanding that all these elements are quite deliberate stylistic features consciously employed to devastating effect by a master film maker in total control of his medium. If you don't understand this when you see it, keep watching it again and again until you do understand it. The Criterion DVD is of superb quality with a useful booklet about the film.

Shadows and Fog, one of Woody Allen's best films, is a successful experiment in combining Kafka-like surrealism (Orson Welles' The Trial seems like a clear influence,) typical Allen neurotic comedy, and film noir. The film overcomes its influences to make a profound statement about the human predicament in a way that is not at all pretentious. Allen stars as Max Kleinman (Max = big, Kleinman = small person,) a skittish coward who is drafted by local vigilantes in a plan to catch a murderer (Lang's M is also a clear influence,) but ends up wandering around in a literal and existential fog complaining, "I can't find out my role in the plan." The excellent black and white photography is just right for the mood. The movie gains extra interest from a number of star cameos, including Madonna, Lily Tomlin, John Malkovich, and Jody Foster. I saw it on the adequate MGM Home Entertainment DVD; if there is a better Blu-Ray available, it would be worth looking for.

GoodFellas deserves its reputation as one of the best gangster films, and also one of the most realistic: some critics have called it a version of The Godfather without the romanticizing of the gangsters. Based on the actual autobiography of a minor player in the gang hierarchy, the film is one of Martin Scorsese's best, with several sequences of what critics have rightly called bravura film making. As expected from Scorsese, lots of language, some sex and drugs, and intense, shocking violence. But if you want a film like this, this is one you will want. In some ways the film is a trial run for the even longer and more ambitious Scorsese film Casino, which makes it interesting to see both films; personally I prefer the grittier Goodfellas. I saw it on the very good Warner Home Video Blu-Ray.

The Getaway (1972) more than fulfills the expectations we bring to a Sam Peckinpah film, being tough, suspenseful, gritty, and unsentimental, with a nod to Peckinpah's personal mythology of Mexico as the mythic country where the rules are different -- the protagonists don't actually get there, but it is the destination of their whole violent odyssey. Steve McQueen, at his iciest, and Ali MacGraw are a Bonnie-and-Clyde style bank robbing couple who pull a big heist which, of course, goes horribly wrong: in the aftermath they have to dodge both their double- and -triple-crossing partners and the police to escape the country with their loot. The film has a number of stunning sequences -- the scenes where the couple hide in a dumpster and end up being slid into landfill is a classic -- and suspense is kept up throughout. The film's main defect is Ali MacGraw's lackluster performance -- she's at her most effective when she just stands there and lets the photography present her as a warm-blooded sexual foil to McQueen's cold-bloodedness. (Incidentally, McQueen and MacGraw were married after meeting doing this film.) A more memorable performance is given by Sally Struthers as a 180-degree opposite of the wholesome girl next door that is her usual public image.

Advisory: if you know Peckinpah films, you know this will be replete with sex and, especially, violence.

I saw this the 2005 Warner Home Video standard DVD; which was of good quality. There is now also a Blu-Ray, which I suppose would be better.

Shakespeare's rather rarely performed history plays about late medieval English history.

The first series is about three kings, the first of which is a looney-tune who can't do anything right, which is a bad thing in a king, so he very quickly ends up very dead. The second king is more OK, but he can't get anything important done because people keep trying to take him out, while his son wastes all his time boozing it up in this dive saloon with this bunch of Animal House type guys, one of whom, Fat Jack, is a real riot. The third king is this same son who decides that now that he is king he should get serious so he decides to conquer France, apparently not understanding that even if he conquers it, it will just get conquered back again.

The second series is basically about this long gang war between two families, the North White Flowers and the West Blood Roses. Things get complicated because, on the one hand, the Flowers' capo is a heavy dude, while the Roses' boss is mental, but on the other hand, the Roses' boss's moll, French Maggie, is heavier than any dude around. In the end the last man standing is a Flower, Crooked Dick, but he don't stand for long.

Great cast, great settings, great poetry. Extremely violent and bloody: think Game of Thrones without the skin. Check it out.

Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring are more closely related than an original and sequel; they are really parts 1 and 2 of the same film, and in fact were filmed back to back.

Set in Provence around 1920 (most people still use horses, donkeys and mules, but there are a few autos around; telephones exist but are rare, the mayor is very proud to have one), the first film tells of Jean de Florette (Gerard Depardieu,) a rather intellectual bourgeois civil servant from the city who, having inherited a farm in Provence, moves his wife Aimee (Élisabeth Depardieu, Gerard Depardieu 's real life wife at the time) and ten year old daughter Manon there, with the intention of applying scientific principles to raise vegetables and rabbits. But in the arid climate of Provence, everything depends on water: there is a plentiful spring on the property but Jean doesn't know it because his neighbors, local worthy Cesar "Le Papet" ("Gramps") Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and his rather dim nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) have blocked it up, hoping that the lack of water will cause the farm to fail, so they can buy it cheap. This tactic has tragic consequences for Jean's family. The second film recounts how ten years later Manon, now a beautiful young woman, finds both the spring and a way of revenge for what was done to her family. In the end, everyone gets more or less their just desserts.

The films have an interesting history. French writer and director Marcel Pagnol, whose play Marius was latter turned into the French film trilogy Marius/César/Fanny, which was itself remade into the 1962 Hollywood film Fanny with Leslie Caron and other big stars, made a film in 1953, Manon des Sources, telling the second part of the story; his final cut of over four hours was so drastically cut by the distributor that Pagnol disowned it, and later redid the same story as a novel, adding a prequel novel, Jean de Florette; these two books together became the basis for these films.

Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring were a huge success both commercially and critically, and it's easy to see why. The Provencal settings are meticulously detailed and the landscape photography luscious. The acting is all around excellent: Gerard Depardieu and Yves Montand especially are as good as they've ever been.

These films are not perfect works of art: they are not free of sentimentality, some viewers may occasionally be confused about exactly who some of the minor characters are, and the surprise ending ties together all the loose ends so neatly that it may see rather artificial. But these are minor flaws. All in all, this is a production that I think everyone will like: it's one of those rare films that leave you with memories that seem to be of people and places you've experienced rather than seen on a screen.

Morgan Sullivan (Jeremy Northam,) tiring of his dull suburban life, gets a job as an industrial spy for a huge software house, but quickly finds himself in a bafflingly complex and perilous web of deception involving a rival corporation, brainwashing, a sinister, inaccessible Mr. Big, and a mysterious femme fatale (Lucy Liu) who appears at crucial moments only to vanish.

Cypher is an intelligent sci-fi/espionage/thriller, stylishly filmed and well acted. It's the type of science fiction that depends more on ideas than special effects, though those it employs are convincing. (It seems to be set in a near future -- at any rate, the technology used seems a bit beyond what currently exists.) It's a low-budget film that doesn't look low budget thanks to the the skill of director Vincenzo Natali (best known for Cube,) and features one of the more clever surprise endings you'll find. Lucy Liu, as usual, is a joy to watch, and the other actors are generally good. Idiotically rated R for a few profanities. I saw it on the Miramax 2005 standard DVD, which is of very good quality.

For a prize fighter, winning is everything, but if you're a loser when you climb into the ring, you're still going to be a loser when you come out, even if you KO your opponent. Such might be the moral of this very atypical sports movie, starring Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges as aspiring fighters in the lower echelons of the boxing game in and around Stockton, California.

John Huston was one of the most commercially and popularly successful of mainstream Hollywood directors, making such major classics as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen, yet most film historians and critics have been reluctant to rank him among the best cinematic artists. Fat City makes it hard to see why: this gritty, realistic film is one of those great films which surprises you by how much more it seems like real life than like a movie. Keach and Bridges both give what may be their best performances, and Susan Tyrrell, an actress better known for stage work, gives an unforgettable performance as an alcoholic barfly, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, and she should have won.

Fat City is not at all a typical sports film, which by Hollywood convention must show a hero overcoming early difficulties to rise to stardom, nor is it really about boxing, though it includes an extended fight scene which may be the best ever included in a Hollywood film -- the fact that Huston was a prize fighter himself in his youth no doubt adds to the authenticity of the prize ring atmosphere. But this is a film about people, very flawed people who manage to hold onto some shreds of integrity and to be kind to one another, despite the fact that they are all in their own desperate situation. The atmosphere of the seedy towns and endless fields of California's Central Valley, a rare location for major films, is portrayed with great vividness and accuracy.

All in all, not a fun film, but an unforgettable one. The Sony Home Entertainment DVD is of acceptable quality, but this film really needs to be remastered and put on Blu-Ray.

Roger Corman has directed over fifty films (and at age ninety is still active as of this writing as a producer,) some of them, recognized classics of the B-movie genre, such as The Little Shop of Horrors, Bloody Mama, The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and the series of Poe-inspired horror movies featuring Vincent Price, but many others so quickly and cheaply made that they are esteemed as classics of the "so-bad-it's good" genre.

This film is firmly in the latter category. Teenage Caveman, obviously made to take advantage of the 1950s brief fad for "I was a teen-age ..." films, is notable mostly for starring Robert Vaughn in what he said was the worst film he ever made. Production values are minimal -- I've seen worse, but not often -- the cast members look more like they belong in a 1950s TV ad for vacuum cleaners than in the Upper Paleolithic, and the acting, if it is no worse than you would expect in a high school play, is not any better. In short, this will appeal to bad movie fans and not to many others.

Probably properly a one or two star movie, but give it an extra star for the camp value.

A young child is sent from a far country to live with a relative in a gloomy old aristocratic pile. But there are dark mysteries concerning both the estate and the relative. In the course of solving them, the child brings a new understanding to both herself and her relative.

From this outline of the story of The Secret Garden, it should be clear how similar it is to the better known book and film Little Lord Fauntleroy. Both are based on the immensely popular 19th century young people's books by British-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett, and both have been the subject of numerous theatrical, film, and television versions. Of the half dozen or so film/TV treatments, many feel that this 1949 version with Margaret O'Brien, Herbert Marshall, Dean Stockwell, and Elsa Lanchester is the best. The acting is very good to excellent, and the atmosphere of the old house with its ruined garden effectively conveyed. The screenplay is co-authored by Robert Ardrey, who later became well known as a popular science author for such works as African Genesis. An interesting feature of the film from a cinematic viewpoint is the sudden switch from black and white to color (as was done famously in The Wizard of Oz) to highlight the happier scenes.

Though the film, like the book, is ostensibly for young people, it's one that can equally be enjoyed by adults. Of course it's sentimental, but this is the type of film where the sentimentality is the whole point: viewers who dislike sentimentality shouldn't be watching it.