[3] Sylvia Sidney and Cary Grant star in this iteration of Madame Butterfly, the shitty-ass story of a geisha who marries an American Navy officer who leaves her and never comes back. The concept, alone, makes me cringe. Granted, this may be excellent fodder for opera, but stripped of music and left as a bare-bones narrative, this Madame Butterfly is almost torturous for most of …
[8] Barbara Stanwyck plays a lonely librarian who falls in love with Adolph Menjou on a cruise, but her joy is short-lived in this tragic love story directed by Frank Capra. Stanwyck finds out her beau is already married (to an invalid, no less) and ends their relationship, keeping her pregnancy a secret to save his political career. But when a newspaper reporter (Ralph Bellamy) …
[4] Cliff Robertson stars as Charly, a mentally disabled man who agrees to have an experimental operation that makes him more intelligent. But just as the experiment’s success is announced to the scientific world, Charly learns he will soon regress to his original state. Robertson gives an fairly effective performance here, but Charly, based on the required junior high school reading title, Flowers for Algernon, …
[5] I watched this movie several weeks ago and I still don’t quite know how to review it. An assault on the senses? Psychotic in tone? Punishingly serendipitous? Insane?… Yes, it’s all those things. But it’s also a riveting in its own kind of way — completely bonkers, but I simply couldn’t turn away. Paul Walker is a thug (I guess?) who hides in his …
[7] [This review is of the Director’s Cut of the film, not the original theatrical release.] Kevin Costner falls in love with his boss’s wife and lives to suffer the consequences in this brutal but stylish action/drama from director Tony Scott (True Romance, Top Gun). The script sets up a friendly, almost father-and-son relationship between Costner and his boss, played by Anthony Quinn. The relationship …
[8] Colin Firth and Hart Bochner star in this bold drama/thriller from writer/director Martin Donovan and co-screenwriter David Koepp (who teamed together a few years later on Death Becomes Her). Firth stars as a movie theater manager in Buenos Aires who welcomes Hart Bochner as a new roommate in an apartment building full of nosey neighbors. As his roomie wins over the favor of the …
[7] F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most required reading is faithfully script-adapted by Francis Ford Coppola, with Jack Clayton directing a production as lavish as required for the story of the uber-wealthy but mysterious Jay Gatsby. We enter into Gatsby’s opulent world through the eyes of Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway. Robert Redford is superbly cast as the reticent but disarming Gatsby, who ends up roping Carraway …
[6] Robert Redford and Natalie Wood headline this Tennessee Williams tale adapted by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Sydney Pollack. Redford plays a railroad representative who comes to a small Mississippi town during the Great Depression to lay off several of the company’s workers. Despite being the bearer of bad news, Redford develops feelings for the local innkeeper’s daughter (Wood), whose mother is essentially …
[7] Writer/director Alice Wu tells us in the beginning of The Half of It that none of the characters will get what they want, and she’s not lying. But that won’t stop you from rooting for all three characters in this love triangle. Leah Lewis plays Ellie, a Chinese-American who writes love letters for a jock named Paul (Daniel Diemer) to help him woo Aster …
[6] William Wellman’s (Wings, The Ox-Bow Incident) final film is also his most autobiographical, combining his experiences as an American volunteer in the French Legion during World War I with the experiences of a friend who fell in love with a French sex worker. Lafayette Escadrille stars Tab Hunter as the pilot in love, an unruly youth who deserts the Legion and then fights to …
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