“I love this dirty town.” The first and only time that Burt Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker drops the cynical twist from his clenched smile and allows genuine appreciation cross his face in Sweet Smell of Success (1957) is when he drops that line while strolling down the nighttime streets of Broadway. It’s not a proclamation or […]
I Am Legend (2007), the third official adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel (and the first to carry the novel’s name) about the last human in Earth after a plague turns the survivors into undead creatures, strips the story down to essentials. This version, directed by Francis Lawrence, focuses on the visceral experience of roaming an […]
Rebecca Hall, Paul Schneider, and Jonathan Pryce star in Tales from the Loop, a mix of science fiction and family drama inspired by the work of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. The new Amazon Original series debuts in April along with the sixth season of the crime drama Bosch, based the novels by Michael Connelly. Movies […]
Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, a trio of novels that teams up a disgraced journalist with a punk hacker, was an international phenomenon. The books sold millions in translation across the globe and were brought to the screen in Sweden, both in feature films and extended versions for TV. David Fincher directed an English-language version of […]
Richard Burton is Alec Leamas, a once-sturdy MI-6 agent who has become a disillusioned burn-out after seeing too many fellow agents die, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Martin Ritt’s superb film of John le Carré’s novel. The author was a British agent in his own right and his books were […]
Ti West was a young horror director with old-school sensibilities when he made his name with The House of the Devil (2010), a film that seems to come from another time, specifically the boom of the early eighties. Jocelin Donahue (who recalls a young Karen Allen) is well cast as the small-town college girl, future […]
Amazon continues to mine the classic mysteries of Agatha Christie with Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse, a limited series starring Rufus Sewell as a murder suspect who embarks on his own investigation. It’s new to Prime Video viewers in March along with the sprawling international crime drama ZeroZeroZero with Dane DeHaan, Andrea Riseborough, and Gabriel […]
British genre maven Neil Marshall howled his arrival with his werewolf combat thriller Dog Soldiers, a sly and inspired UK hit that made cult ripples stateside. With The Descent (2005), a nerve wracking, claustrophobic survival thriller about six spelunking women hunted by the creepiest cave dwellers to skitter across a screen, Marshall honed his skills […]
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 […]
Slightly Scarlet (1956) isn’t well known to even many film buffs but it’s an interesting film noir in lurid Technicolor (call it a film rouge) from veteran director Allan Dwan, who began making films in the early 1910s and directed everything from Douglas Fairbanks action epics to Shirley Temple dramas to comedies to westerns in […]
