If you are of a certain age and a certain persuasion the you’ve probably got an image of Jennifer Connelly riding a mechanical horse in a white tank embedded in your brain. The image is from a lesser known John Hughes scripted movie, Career Opportunities. Kino Lorber just dropped the 4K UHD on us and I’ve got the review.
It isn’t a great movie, but it is definitely more than that endlessly Gif’ed image.
You can read the review here.
In my review of Naked Alibi which was written for Cinema Sentries back in 2019 I noted that Gloria Grahame was “…one of those actresses I’ve seen in numerous films, but never remember. Whenever she appears in a movie I’m watching, I’m always glad because I know it is going to be a good performance. But then when it’s over I forget who she is. After watching her in this, I think she’ll stick.”
She absolutely did stick. She’s one of the great femme fatales of film noir history and I’m a huge fan.
This film is a good one too, you can read my full review here.
As a kid I knew Walter Matthau from silly comedies like Grumpy Old Men and The Odd Couple, it was only later in life that realized he was a very fine actor indeed. He generally stayed in the comedic lane, but once in a while, he’d take on something more dramatic.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is a terrifically taut little thriller about some dudes hijacking a New York Subway car. Matthau plays a transit cop trying to catch them. It is a wonderful encapsulation of New York in the 1970s.
You can read my full review here.
I’ve talked about Dario Argento, the Italian horror director, many times on this site. He’s one of my favorite horror directors, and certainly my favorite director of Gialli. For a time, during the 1970s and 1980s, he styled himself as something of an Alfred Hitchcock figure – a persona bigger than the movies he made. He produced and hosted several different television series for Italian TV and Severin Films has boxed them all together in this nice little set.
You can read my full review of everything inside over at Cinema Sentries.
One of the things I absolutely love about the abundance of Boutique Blu-ray labels we have now is that they sometimes find these ridiculous, obscure, weirdo movies and clean them up, restore them, and release them on Blu-ray with loads of extras.
Microwave Massacre is a terrible film. It is a movie about a serial killing cannibal, and it is a comedy. Or at least it is supposed to be a comedy. But according to my review (which was written in 2016 which you can read here), there are no laughs to be found.
And yet, it got a killer release from Arrow Video. You gotta love the audacity of that.
My wife speaks French. She has a Masters Degree in French Linguistics. She taught French at university for a time. She loves all things French. Especially movies. Obviously, I love movies and I dig foreign language films. I’ve seen a lot more movies than here, but she is the expert in French cinema in our house. She turned me on to director Jean-Pierre Jeunet with his absolutely delightful film Amelie. Then she hit me with his stranger, darker films Delicatessen and City of Lost Children.
Delicatessen is a visually stunning tale set in a post-apocalyptic world in which a butcher puts a help-wanted ad in the paper then murders those who answer and sells their meat to the rest of the apartment. It is romantic, funny, and a delight. You can read my full review here.
I’m digging back into my old Cinema Sentries reviews again. This review is from February 2020. This French film, directed by Henri-Georges Cluzot, is half film noir with a woman manipulating a man into bad deeds and half melodrama. Honestly, I don’t remember much about it, but according to my review, it is pretty good.
I love me some silly 1980s horror and Trick or Treat is some terrifically silly 1980s horror. Marc Price (of Family Ties fame). He plays a metalhead who accidentally unleashes the ghost of his favorite rocker after he mysteriously dies. At first, the dude helps him prank his bullies but then things (naturally) turn deadly. You can read my full review here.
Venom is basically your standard hostage-taking gone wrong thriller by way of The Desperate Hours with a poisonous snake thrown in for good measure. I love it when movies do that – take a pretty basic plot and then add something nutty to make it interesting. This one would be pretty forgettable except it stars Klaus Kinski and Oliver Reed as the villains and Sterling Hayden as the good guy. Plus Sarah Miles is the snake doctor.
Anyway, you can read my full review here.
When my copy of this disc arrived in the mail, I was confused and a little disappointed. Confused because I couldn’t remember ordering it and disappointed because I knew I had to review it. I do that sometimes – I’ll get a series of PR emails offering all sorts of discs and that little kid inside of me who can’t believe they actually send me free movies if I’ll just write a few paragraphs about them gets all excited. I say “yes” to everything and then when they arrive I wonder what the heck I’m doing.
Generally, I love getting movies in the mail – watching them and reviewing them. But sometimes I get a little overwhelmed with them and I start thinking about the other movies I want to watch. Movies that might fit my monthly theme or something and I’m annoyed at being forced to do something. It is like in school when the teacher makes you read a book. You don’t want to do it even if it sounds interesting.
I was disappointed at receiving My Girl because my memory of it (admittedly a very vague one) was that I didn’t really like the film. Looking at Letterboxd confirmed that opinion with the general consensus being that it wasn’t great.
But I had to watch it and so I did. It was better than I remembered. It is a cute little coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s with a strong performance by the central moppet. It isn’t amazing or anything, but I’m glad I watched it again.
You can read my full review here.
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