City of Women is an admirable cocktail blend of La Dolce Vita, 8 ½, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. The first two make sense- this is twenty years after the first (of

Billy Wilder adapts Agatha Christie to great success in Witness for the Prosecution. Witness for the Prosecution appears often on lists of the best court room films. Wilder’s achievement is muted, this is a greater

Peeping Tom killed the career of the great auteur Michael Powell. The film was rediscovered, and its reputation was largely saved (or at least revived) by Martin Scorsese in the 1980s. But, I have enough

The Sand Pebbles is a well produced handsome film. It was made at a time when director Robert Wise and star Steve McQueen were at the height of their powers. Wise was coming off The

Power past the absurd title if you admired Anthony Mann’s T-Men (1948) and are seeking out something similar (if admittedly a little lesser) and appreciate a good film noir. The production team from T-Men is

With the wide canvas and beautiful pink titles in the opening credits—this feels like Minnelli from the very opening frames. After the titles, the film starts as an infomercial for Susanswerphone- an upscale answering service

Steven Spielberg (29 years old in 1975) went into Jaws as a promising young filmmaker and emerged as a wunderkind with a masterpiece under his belt. Jaws also smashed box office records and Spielberg became

Black Jack is a decade after Ken Loach’s landmark Kes (1969). This has some connections to realism, but it is a period film (set in the mid-18th century) and shot on grainy 16mm (Kes is

Fassbinder was moving so fast in the 1970s that some the projects can bleed into each other upon recollection-- but not Despair. This is auteur cinema: the inevitable self-destruction of the protagonist paired with the

  Give it up to James Gunn- the action director (and comedian) has gone from Marvel to DC and has not lost his identity. This is a James Gunn film through and through and makes

Cruising is a difficult film to remove the story surrounding the film: the controversy, the sensationalizing, the subject matter. Cruising marks the promising pairing of William Friedkin (who wasn’t riding quite as high in 1980