Rental of the Week

A taut and nifty melodrama-noir with a strong reactionary bent, The Reckless Moment is essentially about love and the the redemptive acts of selflessness it can inspire.

A character portrait, both epic and intimate, that studies the sexual lives of two men, friends, over the course of the mid to late Twentieth Century, Carnal Knowledge does nothing if not remind us that life in post-war America was a lot dirtier than we’re often led to believe.

Gripping and absorbing from beginning to end, Michael Clayton is a well-crafted legal thriller. The movie isn’t perfect but it is solid all around and with the way it’s being acclaimed, it is a title to keep an eye on during awards season. This marks the first feature film debut by writer Tony Gilroy who has written the scripts to the Bourne movies and The Devil’s Advocate. Like Scott Frank did with this year’s earlier thriller The Lookout, Gilroy has made a memorable first impression as a director.

Four trenchcoated older men with color-coded code names, wearing old-fashioned hats, black-rimmed glasses and ersatz mustaches, board a crowded downtown No. 6 train (called, by transit staff, “Pelham One-Two-Three” for its departure time and point of origin) stop by stop, starting at Fifty-Ninth Street. By Thirty-Third, they’ve overtaken the two conductors at gunpoint. (”I didn’t know these things went backwards!” exclaims one when no longer in control of his train.)

“This is really a great city, I don’t care what anyone says,” Woody Allen mutters earnestly over Manhattan’s well-known money-shot of the 59th St. Bridge and, thanks in large part to Gordon Willis’ magnificent photography, he really makes you believe it. Manhattan, kicking down the cobblestones on the heels of Allen’s much derided Interiors, is a return to the comedic form of the beloved (and Academy Award sweeping) Annie Hall, though with a matured voice; despite its poignancy, Annie Hall is, for the most part, tonally silly, while Manhattan plays more like Interiors with jokes. It’s about modern romance, New York City and the way the two intersect; as Allen says in the introduction, of his love for New York, the film’s “romanticized all out of proportion”.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Werner Herzog, as the prolific documentarian that he’s become, tried his hand at the faux-documentary. Well, why not? “Mockumentary” would be the wrong word to describe The Wild Blue Yonder, despite its familiarity and wide usage, as there’s rarely a hint of humor [...]

On-line rental companies now offer democratized, unprecedented access to the annals of film history, but the copious selection can be a bit daunting and counterproductive: what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help steer you towards good film and away from the bad.
The “Edward Norton Rule of Making It” states that all up-and-coming, [...]

On-line rental companies now offer democratized, unprecedented access to the annals of film history, but the copious selection can be a bit daunting and counterproductive: what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help steer you towards good film and away from the bad.
Condescending, pedantic and powerful, Funny Games is essentially an essay on [...]

On-line rental companies now offer democratized, unprecedented access to the annals of film history, but the copious selection can be a bit daunting and counterproductive: what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help steer you towards good film and away from the bad.
Warren Beatty had a tendency in the 1970’s to take a [...]

On-line rental companies now offer democratized, unprecedented access to the annals of film history, but the copious selection can be a bit daunting and counterproductive: what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help steer you towards good film and away from the bad.
As the recent Broadway production, and upcoming film adaptation, of Frost/Nixon [...]

On-line rental companies now offer democratized, unprecedented access to the annals of film history, but the copious selection can be a bit daunting and counterproductive: what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help steer you towards good film and away from the bad.
The Devil Doll, directed by Tod Browning (Freaks, Dracula), has a [...]

If you want to point to one of the most influential martial arts films ever made, The One-Armed Swordsman has to be near the top of the list. Released in 1967, it was the first film to crack the $1 million barrier at the Hong Kong box office, and helped to usher in a new [...]

I had never heard of this title prior to seeing the announcement of its release. It just looked like such an odd title for a martial arts flick, when compared to what I am used to from Shaw Brothers films. Perhaps that is my lack of in-depth familiarity with their catalog, but it does not [...]

On-line rental companies now offer democratized, unprecedented access to the annals of film history, but the copious selection can be a bit daunting and counterproductive: what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help steer you towards good film and away from the bad.
B-moviemaking at its very finest, the efficient and compact Mad Love [...]

On-line rental companies now offer democratized, unprecedented access to the annals of film history, but the copious selection can be a bit daunting and counterproductive: what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help steer you towards good film and away from the bad.
As Ninotchka was billed as, “Garbo Talks!”, Only Angels Have Wings [...]

The advent of on-line DVD rental has brought unprecedented, democratized access to the archives of film history. The copious selection, however, can be a bit daunting and counterproductive–what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help you navigate through the available annals of cinematic history, to function as a minor guide as [...]

On-line rental companies now offer democratized, unprecedented access to the annals of film history, but the copious selection can be a bit daunting and counterproductive: what, exactly, should you watch? This column hopes to help steer you towards good film and away from the bad.
The Parallax View is regarded as a paragon of the ’70s [...]

Ostensibly, The Fugitive Kind has as sure a recipe for success as one could imagine: a talented director in his fresh, up-and-coming days; a screenplay by perhaps the most renowned playwright in American history; and a lead performance from the most revered American screen actor of all time, from when he was still at the very top of his game. (Not to mention Boris Kaufman on cinematography!) And yet, despite delivering on a number of accounts, The Fugitive Kind is relatively obscure for a reason: it’s an ultimate failure of a film.

In contrast to what Gary Giddins called William Castle’s “medium-concept horror movies…for the adolescent market” from the same period, The Innocents is a high-minded ghost story, intended “for adults” as the original trailer makes incessantly clear. Adapted from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, it is a film both literary and poetic, while simultaneously managing to be utterly cinematic and viscerally frightening. It is the rare supernatural thriller that is made exactly how supernatural thrillers ought to be made.

Boy, Criterion’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one, eh? The Most Dangerous Game might be fun to catch on television in the wee small hours of the morning, and it may be a head above its now forgotten B-movie contemporaries, but any case for it as a cinematic touchstone—and isn’t that what we expect movies released by Criterion to be?—would be, uh, spurious, at best.