Any dedicated cinephile who has traveled to London and Paris knows that those two magnificent cities are a film lovers’ paradise catering to the discerning movie buff with countless repertory cinemas and alternate screening venues (museums, holy shrines like the BFI and the Cinematheque Francaise, hole-in-the-wall movie clubs, etc.) But who knew that Madrid was [...]

After 13 years as a MGM player and star attraction with 19 feature films to her credit, Esther Williams found herself facing an uncertain future in 1955 when her contract with the studio ended. But her next move not only surprised herself but must have made her fans and former colleagues at MGM do a [...]

In the event-packed hurly burly of TCM’s second annual Film Festival in Los Angeles recently, I didn’t have a chance to blog about all of the films or attending guests that I saw but here are a few that linger in the memory that deserve to be singled out – cinematographer/director Haskell Wexler, who participated [...]

End-0f-the-world movies? Yes, there is one I long to view after seeing images from it and reading about it for years, even though no one has made any claims of it being a great film.  DELUGE from 1933. 

I’m a habitual listmaker and one list I am always revising is the short list of films I long to see. Occasionally titles fall off the list as they become available on DVD, Blu-Ray or via streaming but so many continue to remain elusive on the domestic front. Netflix certainly offers some welcome options not [...]

Next to William Shakespeare, Sophocles is probably the most enduring and internationally renowned dramatist in terms of his work still being adapted for the stage, television and cinema….and I doubt you will find a more bizarre or outre version of his Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex than FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES. Directed by Japanese avant-garde filmmaker [...]

Retitled and released as Outback in the U.S. and Great Britain in 1971, Ted Kotcheff’s WAKE IN FRIGHT was barely noticed by American critics and moviegoers and quickly vanished from screens. What attention it did receive in England at the time was mostly critical of the film’s negative depiction of the Australian Outback region and [...]

You wouldn’t think there would be a connection between these two people but they were linked forever in 1953 over the film adaptation of Rachel L. Carson’s award winning book, The Sea Around Us. Carson was a respected marine biologist and an unusually eloquent nature writer whose first book, Under the Sea Wind, received critical [...]

Films about housewives losing their identity in a marriage or slowly going bonkers from the daily rituals of domesticity are plentiful enough to form their own distinctive subgenre. Among the most intriguing of these films, all of which reflect the specific time and cultural moment in which they were made, are Frank Perry’s Diary of [...]