Category Archives: Movie of the Week

One of the highlights of the three-week festival of Elia Kazan movies playing the Film Forum October 9 through 29 is the controversial director's controversial 1956 white-trash comedy BABY DOLL. Condemned upon release by the Catholic League of Decency as … Continue reading →

In addition to the main slate of new foreign and independent cinema, the 47th New York Film Festival will also feature the first U.S. retrospective of the great Hindi filmmaker, Guru Dutt. Hailed as “one of that cinema's great auteurs” … Continue reading →

It’s been a long time since Leos Carax’s name was hot on the lips of cinephiles. His controversial Melville adaptation, POLA X, made its splash ten years ago now. Since then, not much has been heard from Carax: “My Last … Continue reading →

Okay, Los Angeles, it's time to put up or shut up. This weekend, the recently revitalized Los Angeles County Museum of Art cinema program wraps up a two-week Hong Sang-soo series with four films by the director including the L.A. … Continue reading →

::Click on the image above to view the trailer:: Queasiness by the fledgling film company Orion over the potential for gang violence and subsequent misguided art-house release doomed OVER THE EDGE [Kaplan/1979] to box-office failure, but the smart social critique … Continue reading →

The first time I heard the album SOMETHING DEEPER THAN THESE CHANGES [2003] by the black singer-songwriter known as Stew (also the front man of the Los Angeles band The Negro Problem) I didn't quite know what to make of … Continue reading →

THE BANK DICK (1940), like so many other W.C. Fields pictures, feels less like a movie and more like a waking dream experienced after a long night of drinking. As Egbert Sousé (accent grave on the e: “soo-SAY”), Fields plays … Continue reading →

Click on the image above to view the trailer. Exploitation filmmaker and DVD peddler William Lustig returns to Anthology Film Archives this summer to guest-program a week of genre gems from the grindhouses of the 1970s. Among the underscreened and … Continue reading →

The 1906 murder of Grace Brown was a fairly mundane one, inconveniently pregnant woman clumsily murdered by boyfriend who suspects he can do better, with boyfriend's eventual execution to follow. Yet author Theodore Dreiser saw in the sad tale a … Continue reading →

Turning counterculture into family-friendly entertainment can't be easy, but Jim Henson always made it look that way. Turning 30 this year, THE MUPPET MOVIE might be its generation's greatest achievement in that nebulous genre of family entertainment — the kind … Continue reading →