Kubrick’s Shining
[originally published in Film Comment, July-August 1980] Camera comes in low over an immense Western lake, its destination apparently a small island at center that seems to consist of nothing but...
View ArticleLiverpool and America Lost And Found: The BBS Story – DVDs/Blu-rays of the Week
Liverpool (Kino) A journey through the bleak winter landscape of Tierra Del Fuego, Lisandro Alonso’s fourth feature Liverpool is part road movie and part enigmatic character piece. A sailor (Juan...
View ArticleReview: The Missouri Breaks
[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976] I was prepared—by Tom McGuane’s insipid earlier scripts and by Brando’s increasingly self-indulgent performances in recent years—to dislike The...
View ArticleReview: The Missouri Breaks
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] More than a fair share of iridescent, long-shadowed mornings and ghostly blue, otherworldly evenings mark the twilight of an era in The Missouri...
View ArticleReview: One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
[Originally published in Movietone News 48, February 1976] In just about every Jack Nicholson performance there is a moment (often more than one moment) when Nicholson’s face reflects something...
View ArticleVideophiled: Mike Nichols’ ‘The Fortune’
The timing wasn’t planned but it is fortuitous. The Fortune (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), a screwball comedy directed by Mike Nichols, debuts on Blu-ray a month after Nichols passed away. The 1975...
View ArticleVideophiled: Twilight Time’s bloody ‘Valentine’
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) gave Roger Corman the biggest budget of his career to date. After more than 40 films, most of them for the budget-challenged AIP, he was hired...
View ArticleVideophiled: ‘The Wild Angels’ and ‘Psych-Out’
Before Easy Rider there was The Wild Angels (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD), directed by Roger Corman and starring Peter Fonda as Heavenly Blues, the leader of a California chapter of Hell’s Angles. This is a...
View ArticleReview: The Passenger
[Originally published in Movietone News 41, May 1975] Long after any sane deadline for MTN 41—with half the pages already slapped down, in fact—Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, formerly...
View ArticleThe bars on the window: Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger’ makes an overdue return...
[Originally published in Queen Anne News, Nov. 16, 2005] [The Passenger screens at the Seattle Art Museum on Tuesday, March 24; details here] My wife and I saw Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger at...
View ArticleReview: The Last Detail
[Originally published in Movietone News 30, March 1974] One of life’s great delights is surprise, and this surprising picture gives great delight indeed. For me, the chief element of surprise comes...
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