Author: Paul Brenner
Son of Paleface
When one ponders the wacky western film romp, one thinks immediately of Blazing Saddles.Forget Blazing Saddles. I'm putting my big, fat western wallet down on an early Frank Tashlin film from 1952 starring the ineffable...
Movie Review posted on 31st May 2009
Fugitive Girls
In the Ed Wood-scripted Fugitive Girls, Wood and director A.C. Stephens give Quentin Tarantino a run for his money. Wood and Stephens ganged up before for the mid-'60s spook a-go-go romp Orgy of Dead...
Movie Review posted on 12th April 2009
The Yakuza
In 1974, the advertisements for Sidney Pollack's Americanized Japanese gangster movie The Yakuza stated, "A man doesn't forget. A man pays his debts." Well, not in today's economy. But in 1974 paying debts meant something...
Movie Review posted on 3rd April 2009
The Sundowners
Deborah Kerr as Ida Carmody, an indomitable stick in the Australian outback, makes an impassioned plea for women living a nomadic existence in that spare country down under to the unhappy Jean Halstead (Dina Merrill),...
Movie Review posted on 25th March 2009
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
They don't make films like Mutiny on the Bounty anymore. The road show spectacular is a lost art that has disappeared along with 70mm cameras. But in 1962, MGM's remake of the Gable-Laughton Mutiny of...
Movie Review posted on 12th February 2009
Julius Caesar
"Caesar! Beware of Brutus. Take heed of Cassius. Come not near Casca. Have an eye to Cinna. Trust not Trebonius. Mark not well Metellus Cimber. Decius Brutus loves thee not. Thou hast wronged Caius Ligarius....
Movie Review posted on 7th February 2009
The Teahouse of the August Moon
When Marlon Brando is first encountered in The Teahouse of the August Moon, Daniel Mann's 1956 film version on John Patrick's Pulitzer Prize winning comedy of 1953, you want to fight back. Here is Brando...
Movie Review posted on 31st January 2009
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
In Mark Herman's adaptation of John Boyne's controversial children's bestseller offering a kid's-eye view of Holocaust, the young eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) has the wide, blue-eyed innocence of the unprotected. Sheltered and half in a...
Movie Review posted on 7th November 2008
Beautiful Losers
In Jean Renoir's 1936 Popular Front comedy-drama The Crime of M. Lange, an unsavory publisher takes it on the lam and leaves his staff in the lurch. Unwilling to break up their camaraderie, the staff...
Movie Review posted on 8th August 2008
Damage Done
Roy Burdine's Damage Done begins like a sucker punch to the head.Elliot (Zach Selwyn) is driving down the highway in a bleached out, barren American landscape and spies a jaw-dropping beauty (Bonnie Warner) trying to...
Movie Review posted on 18th February 2008
The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival
Lerner, utilizing footage shot for his folk festival documentaries, presents Dylan in context with full performances from each of his festival appearances in 1963 to 65, in one of the great rock performance films, The...
Movie Review posted on 21st October 2007
Leave Her to Heaven
The second half of a double feature shown at The New York Film Festival with Drums Along the Mohawk, and introduced by Martin Scorsese under the auspices of Scorsese's The Film Foundation as a restored...
Movie Review posted on 20th October 2007
Hamlet (1921)
Although shot in Germany in 1921, this Sven Gade and Heinz Schall version of Hamlet is one of the most bizarre and revisionist film versions of Shakespeare's tragedy you are likely ever to see. In...
Movie Review posted on 4th October 2007
Suggested
Billie Eilish - NDA Video
Billie Eilish thinks she may have taken it too far as she sees stars in her latest single release, 'NDA'.
Ed Sheeran - Bad Habits Video
Ed Sheeran channels a kind of vampire Joker in the video for his new electronic single ‘Bad Habits’; a song taken from his forthcoming album...
Album Of The Week: The 37th Anniversary of 'Purple Rain' by Prince
On the 25th June 1984 Prince released an album that would super-charge his popularity and elevate his status beyond imagination.
