The Filmic I: Movie Notes

N obody connected with True Heart (1997) appears to be even casually inclined to make a decent movie: not the people behind the camera, not...

Shenanigans . Elliot Gould, Tom Skerritt, Donald Sutherland T hose of you who think that movies are entirely a visual medium, and th...

T he celebrated partnership of Vittorio De Sica, an actor who became one of Italy's—and the West's—most revered directors, and Cesar...

W hat made Rex Harrison want to be in Dr. Doolittle ? Was he strapped for cash? Did he screen Barabbas or Fantastic Voyage or The Vikings ...

I 'm very nostalgic for those stray movies between about 1979 and 1983 that gave hip audiences a sense of ownership of those movies—a sm...

S aratoga Trunk has long been at the top of my list of guilty pleasures. This 1945 costume melodrama is stuffed with the emotional and them...

The thinking—if that's the word—behind The Expendables 2 (2012) seems to be: "We're over-the-hill action stars who can no long...

Onibaba (1964), the Kaneto Shindo film I'd been meaning to see for ten years, isn't particularly terrifying or scaled to overwhelm....

Just about every venerated American institution takes it on the kisser in His Girl Friday (1940). Nothing is sacred—politics, marriage, m...

Ruby Keeler, bless her heart. It's tough to say which aspect of hers is clumsier—her hoofing or her acting. But no matter, because her r...

In answer to the question: What is the greatest American movie performance of the early sound era? Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931) or ...

The loose, romantic playfulness of Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) is lifted from screwball comedy of the 1930s. This laid-back romp gives ...

Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (1939) was voted the third greatest film of all time by an international group of critics for a 1962 Sigh...

Boulevard of broken dreams. The Great Gatsby (2013) is a brashly kinetic adaptation of a literary landmark. Filled with flaws of taste,...

Sidney Lumet, who died two years ago, directed Dog Day Afternoon in 1975. It's his best movie. Like Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver ...