![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
![]() Think the title is long? Consider yourself warned: this boring movie never seems to end, meandering for nearly 2½ hours. Plus it commits the deadly sin of assuming that the viewer is familiar with the particulars of Jesse James’ early legend, without which the poorly told story has no narrative… |
||||||
![]() This terrific thriller is slyly engaging at the outset, then tremendously tense and intriguing for the duration, the sort of movie that has you intensely talking about it – working through the twists and turns – after leaving the theater. French heartthrob Guillaume Canet is to be commended fo… |
||||||
![]() The best Bond? Hardly, notwithstanding its haughty reputation and terrific title. Connery’s in rare form, granted. However the Bond girls are … who are they again? Former beauty queen Daniela Bianchi and a pair of Gypsies. Hardly Ursula Andress, Halle Berry or Jane Seymour. The übervi…
WikChip Image
Connery & Miss World Runner-Up
|
||||||
![]() Goldfinger has everything we love about James Bond, other than a memorable Bond girl. It’s got Sean Connery driving his legendary Aston Martin, complete with ejector seat and machine guns. It’s got a great “Bond, James Bond” and “Shaken, not stirred.” Most valuably, Goldfinger himself is a t…
WikChip Image
Oddjob's killer hat.
|
||||||
![]() A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. The sugar: a terrific love story. The medicine: the wanton cruelty and dehumanization endemic to the nascent Soviet Union. Director David Lean – King of the Epics – reunited with Omar Sharif and several essential crew members from "Lawrence of Ar…
WikChip Video
They don't make 'em like they used to.
|
||||||
![]() Lesser Tarantino but accomplished Tarantino still, Jackie Brown sports a full house of his filmic qualities. Half a dozen stars unspool a cockamamie but coherent story over 2½ hours, complete with bad guys taking each other out, sudden ends and funny surprises. Then there’s the down and dirty…
WikChip Image
Now that's a cast!
|
||||||
![]() More than just the chariot race, Ben-Hur virtually defines big screen epic. At three and a half hours, it’s a lot of movie, full of bravura performances, grand visuals, and tasteful religious symbolism. One of only three movies to win 11 Oscars,1 it deserves the acclaim that accompanies the…
WikChip Image
Ben-Hur: This, in widescreen Technico...
|
||||||
![]() Ben Kingsley gets in much deeper than planned after seducing a much younger Penélope Cruz in Elegy. Isabel Coixet’s movie comes by its sexual fixations via pedigree: Phillip Roth’s novel The Dying Animal. Think of it as Portnoy’s Complaint, the When I’m 64 rendition – "Will you still nee…
WikChip Video
Ben Kingsley seduces Penélope Cruz
|
||||||
![]() Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges! The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, OTOH, does need to be viewed by every serious movie fan. By turns funny, challenging and intriguing, it deserves its status as one of the greatest movies of all time. Humphrey Bogart’s scurrilous Fred C. Dobbs …
WikChip Image
"What gold does to men's souls"
|
||||||
![]() Want to hear what perfect dialog sounds like? Listen to Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Credit Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and director Billy Wilder, three legendary writers who didn’t get along but nonetheless birthed “the paradigmatic film noir.”1 A perfect…
WikChip Video
MacMurray & Stanwyck speak perfect di...
|