Black Magic (1949), a gothic drama starring Orson Welles, is one of the best of Welles’ films of the era that he didn’t direct. The mid-budget costume drama from independent producer Edward Small, an adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ novel “Joseph Balsamo,” stars Welles as the 18th century hypnotist and charlatan Cagliostro, a gypsy showman who […]
Tag: Fandor
‘The Italian Connection’ – Mob schemes on Amazon Prime Video
The Italian Connection (Italy, 1972), from Italy’s king of crime cinema Fernando di Leo, stars Mario Adani (the top dog thug of the Americano’s gang in di Leo’s earlier Caliber 9) as Luca, a remarkably affable and well-liked pimp whose popularity on the street makes the Milan boss nervous. So he frames Luca for a […]
‘The Belladonna of Sadness’ on Amazon Prime and Fandor
The Belladonna of Sadness (Japan, 1973), a lost classic of Japanese animation, is an erotic drama by definition, but it is quite a sophisticated one that is part subversive folk tale, part rock ballad musical, and part experimental filmmaking. Set in an unnamed kingdom in an abstracted medieval Europe, it’s a provocative film about female […]
Fernando Di Leo’s ‘Milieu Trilogy’ on Amazon Prime Video and Fandor
Fernando di Leo was, in the estimation of genre-hound Quentin Tarantino, “the master” of the Italian crime movie, or the “poliziotteschi.” A violent action genre that picked up the escalating violence of American films like Dirty Harry and The French Connection, films where blood spattered and cops got their hands dirty, it was never as […]
‘The Exiles’ on Fandor and DVD
The Exiles (1961), Kent Mackenzie’s independently produced drama, chronicles the lives of urban American Indians (all of them non-actors drawing from their own lives) on the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles over one long, alcohol-lubricated night. Homer dropped out of school, left the reservation, joined the Navy, and now drinks his nights away with […]
The silent horror of ‘Behind the Door’ on Fandor
Behind the Door (1919) (Flicker Alley, Blu-ray+DVD) was for decades a film known by reputation only. A good film, yes, but more than that a notorious one, for what lay behind the door was… No spoilers because the film, once known to exist only in incomplete form, has been reconstructed and restored by the San […]
‘Out 1’ – The legendary French New Wave epic on Netflix and Fandor
Jacque Rivette’s Out 1 (1971) is one of a kind: an almost 13-hour film in chapter form and a radical experiment in filmmaking and collaborative storytelling. Rivette was one of the founding brothers of the French New Wave but he was interested in a different approach to making movies. So he invited a cast of […]
‘The Forbidden Room’ on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Fandor
Canadian iconoclast Guy Maddin has been making strange, surreal films that evoke the images and storytelling traditions of silent movies for decades. The Forbidden Room (2015), which he co-directed with his former student Evan Johnson, is like a compendium of his obsessions and cinematic fetishes. It opens on a mock-instructional film on “How to Take […]
William Gillette is the original ‘Sherlock Holmes’ on Fandor
The 1916 Sherlock Holmes was not the first film based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective but it is by all accounts the first Holmes feature and in many ways it remains the most important Holmes film ever made. It’s an adaptation of the popular stage play written and produced by William Gillette, who drew […]
Indian crime epic ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ on Netflix and Fandor
Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) is a crime epic from India that spans seven decades and three generations in the lives of two crime families: the Singh clan, which takes over coal mining town of Wasseypur in the eastern India state of Jharkhand upon independence, and the Khan clan from the impoverished working class. Shahid Khan […]