Category: Film

The best of the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn cycle, not so much for the Garson Kanin-Ruth Gordon screenplay (which lacks the sophisticated bite of Adam’s Rib) as for the magnificently relaxed and graceful teamwork of the stars. George Cukor directed this 1952 film of a hustling trainer (Tracy) who grooms an extraordinarily gifted gym teacher (Hepburn) […]

O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms transposed to a Cairo setting for an Egyptian film directed by Raafat El Mihi (1981).

This 1970 cult favorite enjoyed a blue-chip DVD release from the Criterion Collection, though its genesis story is more entertaining than the movie itself. Made for $6,500 by a trio of teenage horror geeks, abetted by Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher Forrest J. Ackerman, it’s a charmingly amateur retread of H.P. Lovecraft: four teens discover […]

Eleanor Antin, Suzanne Lacy, Miriam Schapiro, and Arlene Raven are among the artists featured in this documentary on ten years of feminist art in California, produced by the Long Beach Museum of Art Video.

Shaken when a bomb destroys the nightclub where he’s working, a saxophonist embarks on a private quest to find the perpetrators. Neil Jordan (The Company of Wolves) directed this 1982 Irish film; Stephen Rea stars.

Mangled by its producer, Sam Peckinpah’s 1965 film keeps building to apocalyptic climaxes that never materialize—Peckinpah would have to wait until 1967’s The Wild Bunch to get his ferocious vision on the screen. Charlton Heston is the cavalry officer assigned to eliminate Apache resistance; Peckinpah makes a fine, ironic use of his stentorian presence in […]

This 1925 film remains the textbook example of German expressionism with its moody lighting, intimations of decadence, and fluid, subjective camera work (by the great Karl Freund). Yet the blatancy that makes it so easy to teach is also its chief drawback as art. Expressionism needed the taste and insight of a Murnau to be […]