Drama

[5] Gary Grimes and Jerry Houser reprise their roles from the emotionally charged Summer of ’42 in this lackluster, somewhat pointless follow-up. Whereas Summer of ’42 was very much about a young man’s sexual awakening with an older woman, Class of ’44 is more of a slice-of-life movie with no overarching narrative goal. It sees Grimes and Houser’s characters off to college while their friend …

[7] Ben Silverstone and Brad Gorton star as closeted gay teens at a British high school. One is a journalism nerd and the other is a star athlete. They discover each other though an anonymous encounter in a public restroom and develop a secret romance. But while Silverstone’s character becomes more confident in his identity and comes out in a scandalous school paper article, Gorton’s …

[8] Nineteen year-old Tom Cruise made his star-making turn alongside Rebecca DeMornay in writer/director Paul Brickman’s directorial debut, Risky Business. Cruise plays a college-bound teen who’s forced to turn his parents’ upper class home into a brothel for one illustrious night in order to pay for accidentally destroying his father’s Porsche. DeMornay plays a call girl who proposes the whole endeavor. Along the way, they …

[8] In a traveling circus sideshow, a scheming trapeze artist named Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) marries a gullible, love-struck little person named Hans (Harry Earles) with plans of poisoning him and inheriting his fortunes. But there’s a code among sideshow freaks, and when Cleopatra’s dishonesty is discovered, the freaks set out to make her… ‘one of us’. Tod Browning’s (Dracula) Freaks was originally intended to horrify …

[4] Burt Lancaster stars in this fictionalized account of the Nazis’ attempt to abscond with France’s most treasured paintings before the Allied Forces meet up with them. It’s up to Lancaster, playing a Resistance train station master, to head up an elaborate plan to dupe the Nazis and stop the train from leaving France without damaging it’s precious cargo. I love the idea of Resistance …

[3] Stephen Dorff (The Gate, Cecil B. Demented) stars in this satiric story of a convenient store hostage survivor who can’t come to grips with his cult celebrity status after he learns the 36-day siege was televised. While Reese Witherspoon’s supporting character, also a survivor, talks about the experience in honest, dramatic ways on every imaginable TV show, Dorff’s character is amused and bewildered to …

[7] Producer/director Roger Corman completes his series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe with The Tomb of Ligeia, the story of a man mysteriously obsessed with his late wife, Ligeia. When he remarries, he and his new wife find themselves terrorized by supernatural forces, begging the question — is Ligeia really dead? Vincent Price carries the film as nicely as you …

[8] Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence star in this tale of two clinically depressed people (he’s diagnosed bipolar) who strike up an unusual relationship. She teaches him to dance with her for an upcoming competition in exchange for delivering letters to his ex-wife, who has a restraining order against him. While he obsesses over the ex, Lawrence begins to pine for Cooper. Everything comes to …

[5] Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey, Jr. star in David Fincher’s film about the investigation of the so-called ‘Zodiac’ killer in the late ’60s through the early ’80s. Downey and Gyllenhaal’s characters work for the San Francisco Chronicle, which begins receiving letters from the killer. As he seeks fame in the press, Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards are the cops who try for years …

[4] Joan Crawford seems born to play a lady gangster fighting blindness, but unfortunately, This Woman is Dangerous isn’t nearly as interesting as it sounds. The ‘gangster’ aspect of the movie is kept to a bare minimum, with most of the screen time spent on a romance between Crawford and the doctor (Dennis Morgan) who saves her sight. The crux of the story is whether …

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