An older couple, travelling off the beaten path, become frightened by ghosts and report their experience to the Los Angeles police. Fortunately, the cops have an expert in ghosts along with considerable experience with the supernatural, so they investigate and […]
Continue reading »Author: admin
Shock (1946) ✰ ✰ ½
Part of a mini-surge of psychiatric films in the mid to late 1940s (Spellbound, The Snake Pit), Shock stars Vincent Price as a psychiatrist who murders his wife and then becomes the treating physician for the only witness to the […]
Continue reading »My Afternoons with Margueritte (2011) ✰ ✰ ✰
There are some movies, of which La Tete en Friche stands as a shining example, that could or would never be made in America. With its title transposed into the more prosaic My Afternoons with Margueritte, this French film by Jean […]
Continue reading »A Beautiful Mind (2001) ✰ ✰ ½
John Nash, a Nobel laureate in economics, developed important ideas early in his career while at Princeton as a graduate student that led to a faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While there, he also developed profound hallucinations […]
Continue reading »Moneyball (2011) ✰ ✰ ✰
While not the masterpiece that some critics are making it out to be, Moneyball is a darn good baseball movie, one that eschews traditional diamond-based heroics or comedy for a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the process of how a team is built. […]
Continue reading »Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) ✰ ✰ ✰
My short review would be: Not enough Crazy, thankfully not very Stupid, could have used more Love. What that translates to is that this dramatic comedy directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa does not quite fulfill its title. Sure, […]
Continue reading »Apollo 18 (2011) ✰ ✰ ½
Pseudo-documentaries with horror aspects have become relatively commonplace since the surprise hit The Blair Witch Project back in 1999, and with good reason: it is seemingly easy to create “lost footage” which, when suddenly, conveniently found, tells some very harrowing tales. […]
Continue reading »Theater of Blood (1973) ✰ ✰
London critics snub a Shakespearean actor following his career-capping cycle of some of the Bard’s most difficult plays. Deeply injured, he first tries to steal the trophy for Best Actor and then commits suicide in front of the surprised critics. […]
Continue reading »The book
Lee Marvin did not receive his first starring role until he was 40, but in three short years — following the successes of Cat Ballou (for which he won the Academy Award as Best Actor), The Professionals and especially The Dirty Dozen — […]
Continue reading »Why Lee?
For years I had been searching for a subject interesting to me that I could knowledgeably write about to break into the publishing world. I tried a book about baseball movies, but by the time I was into it, several […]
Continue reading »