Monthly Archives: May 2018

Return we now to the early 1970s, the Golden Age of softcore porn, the days of “The Story of O” and “Emmanuelle” and ooh lah lah — “Immoral Tales”   Days when the cognoscenti could say, “Oh, that’s not obscene. … Continue reading →

The brute simplicity of “O Matador/The Killer” makes it feel like an over-budgeted student film, at times. This Brazilian B-Western as has a striking, alien setting — the desert lands of Pernambuco — and the story and style of storytelling … Continue reading →

My favorite book as a teen was “Papillon,” written ex-con Henri Charriere detailing his years in the French penal colonies of South America — French Guiana and Devil’s Island off its coast. Nicknamed “Papillon,” French for “butterfly,” after a tattoo … Continue reading →

Is there an actor in the history of film who’s enjoyed a better third act in his career than Christopher Plummer? Rhetorical question, of course there hasn’t. An Oscar, his choice among all the roles available to actors of his … Continue reading →

God help me, but I’m a sucker for a good literary screen biography, and the more period perfect the better. The likes of “Becoming Jane,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “The Last Station” might live by formula, a “this inspired that” … Continue reading →

Is the Han Solo stand-alone storyline re-opening an old George Lucas recut and messed up “A New Hope” debate? Maybe. Probably. And is one character from that debated scene glimpsed in the climactic brawl? Maybe.

So much for the hope that the back-engineered “prequels” in the “Star Wars” universe would rescue these space operas from the bloat and boredom that J.J. Abrams and friends have given them. “Solo: A Star Wars Story” is a two … Continue reading →

It’s about the run-up to the Iraq invasion, it stars Tommy Lee Jones, Jessica Biel, Milla Jovovich, James Marsden, Woody Harrelson and Rob Reiner, who also directed it. Yes, Reiner’s an outspoken liberal and thus a critic of Bush and … Continue reading →

Et tu, Netflix? Here I am, trying to track down “The Quiller Memorandum,” and you don’t have the rights/bandwidth capacity to be the World’s Greatest Repository of 100 years of Feature Films. But you’re spending money on another GD zombie … Continue reading →