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 accomplishment for Charles Laughton as Sir Wilfrid Roberts and Marlene Dietrich as Christine. Laughton plays this Jabba the Hutt-looking lizard of a cantankerous old man. He is insulting everything and everyone for the entire running time of the film. But, he is hell bent on the truth- and he is so damn likeable despite the description here. “I’m a mean, ill-tempered old man who

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 pages dedicated to Scorsese here so I’ll stick to the text here- that’s how Scorsese would want it anyways. I forgot it actually begins with The Archers (Powell and (former at this time) partner Pressburger) logo before saying “A Michael Powell production”. There is a closeup of an eye for the first frame. The second frame is a stunning cinematic painting here below. This

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 Sound of Music in 1965 (one of the most successful films of all time) and could make just about whatever he wanted (this was a passion project)—and McQueen was between The Great Escape (1963) and Bullitt (1968). The Sand Pebbles is more epic than war film. It is shot on 35mm runs 182 minutes uses the wide 2.39 : 1 frame and it is

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 back along with the strong-jawed leading man Dennis O’Keefe even if Mann is not. Reed Hadley is even here to provide the voice of God narration like T-Men or He Walked at Night. Like T-Men, this rooted as a docudrama with that narration—but it is propaganda. This is one of the first Cold War films (“he’s a fair painter”- “yeah, if there wasn’t so

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 based out of a dingy Brooklyn building- where Judy Holliday’s Ella works. Minnelli ends the film with the infomercial as well to tie things up formally. Ella cares about her clients and gets involved in the lives of many of them- including Jeffrey Moss (played by Dean Martin). This is Holliday’s last film sadly- she passed away at age 43. She was a talented

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 a one man movie industry movement. It opens with a short little horror film of two teenagers at a beach party. The sequence is largely without dialogue, it introduces John Williams’ brilliantly simple score, and has some lovely photography with dusk arriving on the water. Roy Scheider plays Brody- the chief of police in Amity Island. Brody is a former NYPD

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 35mm). Loach is so tied to sociopolitical cinema in the contemporary era--- it just takes a second to recognize Loach here in costume. Loach’s titular character, Black Jack (played by the towering Jean Franval), is really secondary to the Tolly character (young Stephen Hirst). Like Kes, Tolly seems to be a genuinely good soul—a child trapped in a pretty ugly world. Tolly is an

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 marvelous visual style is pure Fassbinder. But this does feel like a different size scale than most of his work. This is easily the biggest budget Fassbinder was given to play with (it is said it was more expensive than all of his many films made prior combined) and the only film he did not write up to this point in his career

  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 for a great companion piece to 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Gunn loves his needle drops from John Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” to Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died”. The Suicide Squad is a film about excess- laughs and violence. These are ensemble films about outcasts on a mission (Seven Samurai, The Dirty Dozen, Inglourious Basterds). A strong reflection shot off a puddle of

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 as he was in the early part of the 1970s with The French Connection and The Exorcist) and Al Pacino (not exactly white-hot himself anymore like he was either). Sadly, this was not the bounce back film either of them were hoping for heading into the new decade. It is 16-minutes before Pacino shows up—and the premise is he’s going undercover (this is Serpico