Old black & white movies.  There are many common aspects of these that I find strongly endearing.  There’s other things that seem pretty laughable today.  Even back in the days of their original release, the separate beds for married couples had to subject to mockery by the general public. I have seen hundreds of such […]

I have seen Rebecca Hall in a few films now, and she is quite versatile.  Even so, I never thought I would see her do a puppet show.  Yet here she is, a puppet on each hand, framed by a crude mock-up of a television, doing a “stranger danger” bit for the benefit of hospitalized […]

Since the 1990’s, I have been a fan of The Residents, a group whose best-known characteristic is their anonymity. The group had their own record label, Ralph (as in the slang for vomiting), on which they had off-beat artists who likely would have been unable to find a home elsewhere. The best known of these […]

I love physical effects.  No knock on CGI, which can be done well, but tactile objects on the screen usually work better for me.  Even better are effects that aren’t even effects.  In Ghost Story, for example, there’s a neat moment where a ghost descends a staircase where a large portion of the stairway is […]

It is just after dawn, but before anybody is on the streets of a very small town.  Despite the absence of cars, a vehicle slowly comes to complete stop at any intersection and signals they are turning right. We’re not even out of the opening credits and we already know something about the driver.  Here […]

Some movies are so overpowering, so easy to obsess over, that we feel a void in their wake.  Casablanca was one such movie, and it is only natural that other works would try to recapture some of that magic, or least the ambiance of its faux-exotic locale. It would be easy to dismiss Tangier as […]

I am not a fan of the Italian niche of horror known as “giallo” but it intrigues me, so I keep digging deeper into the genre. Shock was Mario Bava’s last film and…let’s just say his career didn’t end on a high point.  This is far from the worst horror movie I have seen.  It […]

In 2012, some of the confetti used in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade was discovered to be shredded internal files of the Nassau County Police Department.  Intact strips of paper included names, address, phone numbers and social security numbers of officers, including some who were working undercover. While we know the importance of internal documents […]

I have a ton of noir, but Lady On A Train is the first noir comedy I have seen.  That is a bizarre sub-genre, and this movie only operates alternately as noir or comedy, without really mixing the two.  It’s almost like one movie was crudely grafted onto another–with a third movie, a musical, worked […]

Always interesting when a movie does exactly what it says on the tin. Barbara Stanwyck is the titular lady who develops a taste for gambling while honeymooning in Las Vegas with a new hubby.  We learn this in flashback, after seeing Stanwyck get pummeled by two thugs when she tries to use loaded dice in […]

You know that optical illusion where you first think you’re looking at a drawing of a vase, and then you see the inverse of the image, and it turns out is the outline of two faces staring at each other in profile (or vice-versa)? Liar—you’ve seen something like that before. Anywho, there’s a neat effect […]

Jimmy Stewart stars in a screwball comedy from 1947, alongside Jane Wyman and about a dozen faces (but not necessarily names) that will be familiar to anybody who watches a lot of movies of this vintage.  How could this go wrong? And yet, Magic Town somehow misses the mark. The movie starts out promisingly enough: […]

A lot of people are involved in the production of any movie and, in a movie like Star Wars, there’s an unusually great number of people who were extras, or played minor characters and were unrecognizable under helmets or in latex masks.  Elstree 1976 is a documentary about some of those actors, people of various […]

Second to torture porn, exorcism movies may the worst type of horror film.  Every one of them adheres, to varying degrees, to a boilerplate. Unavoidably, they always have the big exorcism as the final third.  And yet, I must find this genre a guilty pleasure because it seems I have seen every one of the […]

I’m not sure if Spielberg’s influence on 80’s films (whether directing or producing) was such a good thing.  Although he didn’t directly have a hand in 1990’s Spaced Invaders, this is a low-rent riff on many of his recurring themes, notably aliens, suburbs and kids.  There’s even a cute little robot that is befriended by […]