This is the third and final post in  DTV ACTION ITEMS, a three-part series on direct-to-video action movies. Click here for Part 1, an interview with Outlaw Vern, and here for Part 2, a profile of actor Stone Cold Steve Austin. The Asylum is the most disreputable studio in that most disreputable of markets: direct-to-video. [...]

This is Part 2 of 3 in my series on direct-to-video action movies. In last week’s post, direct-to-video action expert Outlaw Vern modestly proclaimed that, “for the time being I think Stone Cold Steve Austin is the most prolific star with a good track record [in DTV].” In Part 2 of my industry shaking series [...]

The summer movie season is obnoxiously approaching, with long-form toy commercial  The Avengers opening on Friday.  While estimable writer-director Joss Whedon is sure to provide a witty quip or two, this is still a 142 minute movie about a gang of men (and a token woman) who wear molded plastic underwear. This 3D “spectacular” will cost [...]

The mind needs structure. So when watching films in quick succession, unexpected linkages emerge, like the strange thematic similarities between Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives (in theaters now from Cinema Guild) and The Farrelly Brothers’ version of The Three Stooges, discovered while watching them back-to-back over the weekend. The first is a critically-acclaimed art [...]

I had a similar reaction to Mr. Stewart when I watched Kim Novak purr her way through Bell Book and Candle, just released by Twilight Time on a gorgeous blu-ray.  He also might have been agog at Westward the Women (1951), the William Wellman femme-Western released in a well-appointed DVD from the Warner Archive, which [...]

Edward L. Cahn directed 11 films in 1961, and You Have to Run Fast was one of them. MGM recently released it on their DVD burn-on-demand service in a crisp transfer, making it easy to appreciate the thriller’s tight construction and  open-air location shooting. The AFI Catalog lists no production dates but it was undoubtedly [...]

Onscreen, Barbara Stanwyck was rarely the nurturing type. She became an icon because of her persona of fearsome independence, her justifiably shameless arrogance next to godliness. So it’s jolting to investigate the byways of her career, in which she played off type, including her elegiac performance in Mitchell Leisen’s noir, No Man of Her Own [...]

Jim Brown retired from the National Football League in 1965, after nine seasons of transcendent athleticism. “For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness, and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil, there is no other like Mr. Brown,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Red Smith. Brown was only thirty years old when he shockingly hung up his [...]

This the final post in my series on the films of Robert Mulligan. Click for parts one, two and three. As much as Robert Mulligan is associated with the South, for To Kill a Mockingbird and The Man in the Moon, he was actually born in the Bronx. A few years after his tepidly received [...]