Director Roman Polanski casts himself in the lead of the psychological thriller The Tenant. Trelkovsky (Polanski) rents an apartment in a spooky old residential building, where his neighbors - mostly old recluses - eye him with suspicious contempt.
When a military computer error deploys a squadron of SAC bombers to destroy Moscow, the American President (Fonda) tries to call them back. But their sophisticated fail-safe system prevents him from aborting the attack, so he must convince the Soviets not to retaliate. In desperation, the President offers to sacrifice an American city if his pilots succeed in their deadly mission over Moscow. A four-star techno-thriller that builds tension and suspense with every tick of the nuclear clock.
I'm gonna wager that most of you know this film already. If so, I shouldn't need to rhapsodize about it. But if you're reading this, and you haven't seen it yet... Jesus man, what are you waiting for? PIECES is pretty much the ne plus ultra of why CG was created - it's terrible, hilarious, amazing, hugely entertaining, wrongheaded, tasteless, gory as fuck, sleazy and altogether wonderful. There's severed limbs and heads a-plenty, a hero who lets his dick do most of his thinking, titty across the board, a random kung-fu fight and some gloriously awful dialogue that begs to be quoted and re-quoted until the sun burns out. (Best line: "The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed at the same time.") This thing... it's epic. Juan Piquer Simon, you will always have a place in my heart. You sick fuck.
Charlotte Hollis, wealthy southern spinster, is shunned by her community for the grisly murder some 40 years prior of her intended, John Mayhew. Even though her guilt in the matter was never proven, the townspeople liken her to a modern-day Lizzie Borden. The murders are similar in nature and the children even taunt her with cruel rhymes. For this reason she lives a life secluded from the mainstream of society.
Death Walks in High Heels (La Morte cammina con i tacchi alti, 1971) is a twisted tale that has a complicated plot structure guaranteed to surprise, but all the classic elements of the giallo are here in spades, from black-gloved murderer to psychosexual weirdness. Scott stars as high-class Parisian stripper Nicole Rochard, who is being stalked with threatening phone calls culminating in a visit from a blue-eyed maniac wielding a straight razor, going on about some diamonds.
Marvellous anti-Nazi propaganda film structured as noir thriller, with Donlevy as the man who assassinates Heydrich in Prague in 1942, hiding out with the Resistance when the Gestapo implement a retributory reign of terror in the city. Brecht, who originally worked on the script with Lang, claimed that his ideas were betrayed by the final product; but Lang's insistence that for most of the film he did employ the writer's work seems borne out by many fine sequences, with the taut, typically Langian action often interrupted by speeches that comment both didactically and intelligently on the proceedings.
One of the most talented Scandinavian directors of present, Pål Sletaune returns with his third feature after his award winning feature debut, Budbringeren (1997) and his follow-up Amatørene (2001). Naboer is a film that will be hated or loved, but if you opt for the latter you'll probably be joined by Roman Polanski as Sletaune borrows inspiration from both Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion and The Tenant.
A rare slasher that is notable for a couple reasons. It was one of the very first shot on video horror movies made for the home video market. One of the first but certainly not the last. Many others would follow the lead and produce cheap shot on video horror movies in hopes of capturing a piece of the exploding marketplace.
The other thing Sledgehammer is known for is being the debut of the Prior brothers. David behind the camera and Ted playing the heroic beefcake lead. I know this place is no stranger to the marvelous wonders of the Prior phenomenon and this is your chance to see where it all began.
What would you do if the world was going to end in 72 hours?
The U.N. Secretary General has announced that a gigantic meteorite will collide with the Earth in three days time. There is no hope of survival after the impact. The world is swept by despair, chaos and death. The inhabitants of the isolated town of Laguna listen in terror to the news.
Seeing the collective hysteria, Ale, a frustrated young man who lives with his mother and does odd jobs around the town, decides to spend his final days shut away in his house, getting drunk and listening to his favorite music.
In the 1930s and 1940s, it seems like nothing scared white America like being outnumbered by Negroes. An endless stream of African jungle adventure films came out exploiting that fear, as did a number of voodoo tales -- Black Moon being one of the earliest. Unlike predecessor White Zombie and successor I Walked with a Zombie, Black Moon details a white woman's encounter with voodoo without dragging in those precocious living dead. This well-made but obscure flick takes place on the fictional Caribbean isle of San Christopher, the birthplace of said white woman, Juanita Perez Lane (Dorothy Burgess). After her parents were killed by the ever-restless natives, Juanita was raised by her Uncle Raymond (Arnold Korff) -- that is, until he discovered that her nurse, "that black woman Ruva" (Madame-Sul-Te-Wan), "filled [her] with the sound of the drums and the sight of blood, poisoned [her] with the voodoo". Raymond shipped her away to New York and apparently beat her senseless, as she has now little memory of her childhood hijinx. Now married to Stephen (Jack Holt) with an adorably irritating child, Nancy, Juanita begins to have a strange compulsion to drum... Drum like the wind! She decides to go back to San Christopher to face the source of her neurosis, and Stephen, the ever-concerned husband, sends his secretary Gail (Fay Wray) to protect her.
Jean Gabin is at his most wearily romantic as aging gangster Max le Menteur in the Jacques Becker gem Touchez pas au grisbi (Hands Off the Loot!). Having pulled off the heist of a lifetime, Max looks forward to spending his remaining days relaxing with his beautiful young girlfriend. But when Riton (René Dary), Max’s hapless partner and best friend, lets word of the loot slip to loose-lipped, two-timing Josy (Jeanne Moreau), Max is reluctantly drawn back into the underworld. A touchstone of the gangster-film genre, Touchez pas au grisbi is also pure Becker—understated, elegant, evocative.
Dominik Graf makes movies for TV that are bigger than TV, but in his case this might be not a problem at all. It seems that his films work best as movies made for TV, TV as movies. This is because of the hackneyed stories he and his writers certainly twist and turn - without the intention, however, of turning them into art. Or rather, it is an art that turns its back to TV. This movement of turning its back remains important, though, as a gesture, a gesture that works best at the place it turns away from: TV. Dominik Graf's art is an art of transcending TV by means of using it, of reproducing it in a radically transformed way. It remains recognizable in the stories, the motives - not the emotions, though. Where TV usually likes to be comforting Graf's films are cruel and alienating. He has made movies for the big screen, to be sure, but in the last ten years (and these are the years in which he has become a truly unique director) his two attempts - Die Sieger and A map of the Human Heart - were terrible flops, not with critics but commercially. Which is a pity mostly for foreign audiences, as for them it is virtually impossible to get hold of the films of one of German's finest directors.
Sisters is the first Hitchcock homage that Brian De Palma directed, and it’s a doozy. There are scenes in any horror film that put the viewer on edge. Right before the slasher slashes his victim or before the monster eats his prey, a good director will rile us up. Sisters takes Hitchcock’s famous comment that he plays his audience like a fiddle to heart, and De Palma makes the first forty-five minutes of the film feel like anyone on screen is about to get hacked up, if only the bogeyman would jump out of the shadows. While there are films, like 1994’s Mute Witness, that offer a similarly distilled horror show, what’s amazing is that De Palma manages to create the sense of a threat without actually revealing the film as a horror film or showing us much action that’s in any way dangerous. He’s obsessing on details and using his camerawork to underline certain dialogue so that we know there must be a point to it all.
A neat World War II thriller, 13 Rue Madeleine benefits from the postwar craze for shooting outside the studio. With Quebec doubling for occupied France, this is a spy movie with a sense of open air. James Cagney plays an OSS agent, training his recruits for an important pre-D-Day mission. When one of them turns out to be a Nazi spy, Cagney must parachute into France himself and straighten things out.
The third film adaptation of John Buchan's espionage novel adheres more faithfully to the source material but fails to reach the suspenseful heights of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 classic version.
It is early 1914. Europe is on the brink of war. London seems peaceful enough but a dangerous conspiracy is underway. Colonel Scudder (John Mills), a retired British Intelligence Service agent has unearthed a plot to assassinate the Greek Prime Minister on a visit to London and thus precipitate World War 1. After a series of assassinations by Prussian agents, Scudder seeks refuge in the flat of Richard Hannay (Robert Powell), a mining engineer on leave in London.
In The Trilogy, three different but parallel stories unfold revealing the lives of a husband and wife, a policeman and his drug-addicted wife, and a prison escapee and his friends. The characters wander in and out of three films where we see them switch from leading men and women to supporting actors. The three films, all of different genres (the first is a thriller, the second a comedy and the third a melodrama), provide the same action from different angles and perspectives. Each film can be appreciated on its own, but together they form a cohesive whole allowing the viewer to gain a deeper understanding of the characters. Although it is reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Balzac’s novels, Lucas Belvaux’s project is unprecedented.
Universally panned by Egypt's cinema audiences when it was first released in 1958, Youssef Chahine's "Cairo Station" disappeared from view for two decades until it was rediscovered and hailed as a masterpiece. Watching the film now, almost half a century after its first screening, it's easy to see why it upset so many people "Cairo Station" is a pressure cooker of lust, jealousy, and psychosis.
Crippled Kenaoui (Chahine), nicknamed "Limpy" by his cruel co-workers, sells newspapers in Cairo's central station. Living out on the tracks, earning barely enough to keep the makeshift roof over his head, he spends his days fantasising about the voluptuous Hanuma (Rostom), a lemonade seller engaged to macho porter Abou Serib (Chawqi). Kenaoui's convinced she'll eventually fall in love with him if he keeps pursuing her. But with a murderer on the loose in Cairo, things may yet take an unexpected turn.
This Hitchcockian thriller brilliantly lays bare Kanaoui's hopeless sexual obsession - in one uneasy scene we watch as he frantically cuts pictures of scantily clad women out of the magazines he's supposed to be selling. Yet, director Chahine (who also plays Kenaoui) never lets us lose sight of this character's humanity. He may be lame, slightly retarded and unhealthily fixated on the cruelly manipulative Hanuma, but does he really deserve to be treated so badly
This is not a great movie but it still fascinates 35 years later. It is obviously influenced by Hitchcock's "The Birds" but it also seems to be inspired by Curtis Harrington's excellent "Games" from a couple of years earlier. ("Games" is influenced by the French film "Diabolique." They both star Simone Signoret.) And, in fact, the closing shots of "Games" and "Eye of the Cat" are very similar, but that is not the only similarity. In "...Cat" Michael Sarrazin attempts a kind of decadence achieved by Signoret in "Games." And there is more: Sarrazin and Eleanor Parker and company play mind-games with one another, just like the "Games." I don't want to give away the implied perversities of either movie, but there are plenty, and they make both Universal Studios films worth watching. I also won't give away the most memorable suspense sequence, filmed in ersatz Hitchcock, subjective style. If you see the movie, you will spot it.
