Pierre Morel’s twist on ‘Escape From New York’ set in a near-future Paris is a lean, clean, B-movie action machine fueled by adrenaline and indignation.
Category: Kanopy
‘Breathless’ – Jean-Luc Godard’s new wave classic on HBO Max, Criterion Channel, and Kanopy
Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a charming rogue of a street thug in this cinematic blast across the bow of the French filmmaking and international cinema.
‘Amores Perros’ – A dog-eat-dog world on Criterion Channel
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s trilogy of stories connected by a crippling car wreck is quite literally a portrait of a violent dog-eat-dog world in the margins of Mexico City.
‘To Catch a Thief’ with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly on Amazon Prime and Paramount+
Alfred Hitchcock’s frothiest entertainment delivers glamor and romance with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly on the French Riviera where a cat burglar is stealing the jewels of rich tourists.
‘Best of Enemies’ – Buckley vs. Vidal on Amazon Prime
Best of Enemies (2015) carries the subtitle “Buckley vs. Vidal” and it is indeed a portrait of a rivalry, one that was presented on prime time network television at a time when there were three networks and TV news strived to be fair and balanced to a fault. In 1968, William F. Buckley was the […]
‘Lore’ – navigating the collapse of Nazi Germany on Criterion Channel and free on Kanopy and Hoopla
Before she was tapped to helm Black Widow for Marvel, Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland directed Lore (Germany, 2012). A coproduction of Germany and Australia with a German cast, setting, and language, Lore takes the viewer on a harrowing odyssey through Germany after the fall of Hitler. The privileged life of fresh-faced German teenager Lore (Saskia […]
‘The Bedroom Window’ on Amazon Prime and Criterion Channel
Future Oscar-winning filmmaker Curtis Hanson first made his reputation with The Bedroom Window (1987), which draws deep from the well of Alfred Hitchcock. Steve Guttenberg plays the everyman hero Terry, a “romantic fool” (in the words of one character) having an affair with the boss’s wife (Isabelle Huppert). She witnesses an assault through his bedroom […]
David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac’ on Amazon Prime
Zodiac (2007), David Fincher’s drama about the notorious unsolved Zodiac killings that had San Francisco gripped in fear during the early seventies, was the filmmaker’s most disciplined, focused, and mesmerizing film to date when it was released in 2007. Based on the non-fiction book by Robert Graysmith, a newspaper cartoonist who became obsessed with the […]
‘Moonrise’ – dreamy rural noir free on Kanopy
The most authentically romantic filmmaker of classic Hollywood, Frank Borzage made films where the power of love conquered all, not simply narrative obstacles and stubborn complications but time and space itself. He’s the last filmmaker you would expect to produce a film noir masterpiece yet in Moonrise (1948) he delivers beautifully. Dane Clark is Danny […]
’20th Century Women’ free on Kanopy and Hoopla
20th Century Women (2016) stars Annette Bening as Dorothea, a single mother of a teenage boy (Lucas Jade Zumann) determined to give him good life lessons with a little help from her friends. Elle Fanning is her son’s best friend, who escapes her troubled family and is warmly welcomed Dorothea, and Greta Gerwig and Billy […]