Category: <span>Reviews</span>

Hitchcock & Cary Grant Present Delightful Mystery

Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock combine in a great caper movie – maintaining just enough menace to be thrilling, whilst also featuring much comedy.

Roger Thornhill, a suave and handsome advertising executive, gets mistaken for someone else by chance and is thrown into a game of cat and mouse where the mouse doesn’t understand why it’s being hunted down. Pursued by Phillip Vandamm (Mason) and his cohorts, Thornhill must enlist the help of beautiful stranger Eve Kendall (Saint) in his quest to understand who exactly is chasing him and who they have mistaken him for.

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Superhero films have been in the limelight for so long it’s hard to forget that just about a decade ago they were something that generally both audiences and comic book fans feared. It was a time before Marvel Studios introduced their cinematic universe and everyone was fighting to play catch-up. Back in those days, superhero movies weren’t connected by shared universes. The idea that you had to wait until the end of the credits for a post-credit stinger was completely foreign.

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Directed by John Hughes, the movie featured Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, and Molly Ringwald – five of the then soon-to-be Brat Pack members who later became well known for flicks such as St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night. Yet, though I remember those equally impressive credits, it’s The Breakfast Club that I’ll most remember them for, if only because the characters all hit so close to home.

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Graphic Novel Gets Excellent Big-Screen Adaptation

People called it the first adult comic book movie – but sidestepping that and all the other chit-chat, Watchmen is a sprawling, sophisticated and gripping film.

The mysterious murder of the Comedian (Morgan), a masked vigilante and member of the Watchmen (a group of superheroes) leads the aggressive and paranoid Rorschach (Haley) to begin investigating whether his murder was random or an attack on “masks”.His actions and investigation bring in the other Watchmen, among them Nite Owl (Wilson), Silk Spectre II (Akerman) Ozymandias (Goode) and the god-like Dr. Manhattan (Crudup), and their lives intertwine following the murder of one of their own to devastating and revelatory effect, foregrounded against the specter of nuclear annihilation between the U.S. and the Soviets.

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Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert Star in Frank Capra’s Screwball Comedy Classic

Regarded as the first screwball comedy, It Happened One Night almost didn’t happen. Once it did, the magic was apparent.

The format of It Happened One Night, the first screwball and romantic comedy, is still seen in romantic comedies today: boy and girl meet, fall in love, fight, break up, yet find true happiness in the end.

Reviews Screwball Comedy

In an uncharacteristic comedic turn, the Master of Suspense brings us romantic fluff for our cinematic sweet tooth with Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) became synonymous with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and their highly-publicized affair that steamed up the pages of tabloids. The film itself sounded like it was plucked from Hitchcock’s filmography, following a pair of married assassins who were unwittingly hired to kill each other, but the director’s own Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) couldn’t be farther from this unrelated tale. Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard are simply a bickering young couple who discover they are not really married, hardly a logical choice for a Hitchcock vehicle. Unfortunately, Hitchcock was forbidden to exercise as much freedom in this early collaboration with RKO studios. Despite these limitations, the sparkling chemistry of the stars and the shining bits of dialogue throughout the film help Mr. and Mrs. Smith transcend the predictability of the plot.

Reviews Screwball Comedy

Classic Comedy Starring Cary Grant & Katharine Hepburn

Film in the United States in the 1930s was an interesting period that produced some of the best films ever made. Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz both premiered before the decade ended in 1939, a year which many film historians deem to be the best year in all of film history.

In the early 1930s, we had the pre-code films which still sizzle today with content that the Hays Code would eventually force out of the film industry for a few decades. All in all, the 1930s were such an interesting time for films — and we’ve decided to discuss the best ones.

We all know the classics (like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz), so this list will focus on films that maybe don’t get the critical acclaim in the 21st century that those films do. While we will still talk about the films that are truly great, regardless of if they may be “overrated”, we thought we’d start with some films that many average film watchers aren’t aware of.

Enter the 1938 film Bringing Up Baby, starring the incomparable Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. This film, coined as one of the first screwball romantic comedies, has an insane plot with memorable characters that get better with each new viewing.

Reviews Screwball Comedy

Enduring Appeal of a Film Noir Classic

Stuart Heisler’s adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel still influences Hollywood, with a tale of dubious alliances and loyalty.

In The Glass Key, Alan Ladd plays Ed Beaumont, right-hand man to Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy), a boorish, ambitious player with political aspirations. When the murder of a reckless playboy casts suspicion on his boss, Ed works to protect Madvig. Matters are further complicated when Madvig falls for the daughter of a wealthy industrialist (Veronica Lake) – especially when Ed falls under the spell of the same girl.

Film Noir Reviews

Robert Montgomery Stars in Landmark Comedy About Second Chances

This 1941 classic is among the most romantic films of Hollywood’s Golden Era, a fantasy perhaps hokey by today’s standards, yet charming, heartwarming, and funny as hell.

The film pretty much pioneered the guardian angel sub-genre, and outside of It’s a Wonderful Life, may be the best of the lot. As prizefighter Joe Pendleton, Oscar-nominated Robert Montgomery (real-life father of Elizabeth Montgomery, “Samantha” of TV’s Bewitched) affects a dese-dems-and-dose, blue collar voice at odds with both his usual urbane screen image and real-life reputation as a wealthy, conservative Republican.

Reviews Screwball Comedy

The China Syndrome is an anti-nuclear thriller-drama that evokes a sight of the terrifying situations. The terrific circumstances might occur if proper safety measures aren’t undertaken towards an electrical plant powered by nuclear energy. This 2 hours movie had aided the protests going on against the application of nuclear power in Bilbao, Spain (July 1977). The film received an extra publicity after a shocking real-life incident at Three-Mile-Island nuclear plant (Pennsylvania) that occurred three weeks after the movie was released.

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Many biopics and historical features focus on the movers and shakers of social and cultural movements. Audiences are witnesses to great acts of selflessness during times of war, groundbreaking artistic brilliance, or a terrific struggle to overcome injustice. “Suffragette” attempts to show us an alternate perspective, that of a newcomer to a political movement, someone who is a participant but not the hero.

This storytelling works well to show us the scope of the suffragette movement, the context, and realities from which it developed. In the opening scenes of the film, we see women and men working in a crowded industrial laundry facility, with steam and heavy machinery. It’s early twentieth-century London, and this is the reality of the working class: long days, child labor, and dangerous conditions. It’s a dirty reality, all grays, dark blues, and browns, with people living in close quarters and mud in the streets.

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Right from the opening scenes, “The Danish Girl” delivers the awards-contender goods. The cinematography brings out the colors and mood of the Danish landscape that Lili Elbe painted. There a thousand shades of blue: cornflower, royal, blue-grey, robin’s egg, and indigo. Windswept grasses and twisted, slender trees frame inlets, and the sun comes down through heavy clouds hinting at the gravity of the film’s topic. As good as the film is – the acting is right on, the cinematography beautiful, the script well done – it is frustrating because it could have been better.

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Beach Pillows is a movie written and directed by Sean Hartofilis which tells the story of Morgan Midwood (played brilliantly by George Arend), a young man who once dreamed of…

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