USA

Damon Runyon’s Broadway fable The Lemon Drop Kid was filmed twice by Paramount Pictures, but only the 1934 version with Lee Tracy paid more than lip service to the original Runyon story. The second version, filmed in 1951, was completely retooled to accommodate the talents of Bob Hope. Known far and wide as the Lemon Drop Kid because of his fondness for that particular round, yellow confection, Hope is a bookie who finds himself deeply in debt to Florida gangster Fred Clark. Magnanimously, Clark permits Hope to head to New York to raise the money–but he’d better have the dough ready by Christmas, or else. Read More »

The staff of the Back Bay Mainline, a Boston underground newspaper that rose to prominence in the 1960s, struggles with the shifting social climate of the ’70s amid rumors that the paper is about to be sold to a media giant.Read More »

Shown in flashbacks by those who now show remorse at her at her funeral, a photographer invites a prostitute to pose for him. They sleep once and he treats her fair, but both his publisher and a stranger woman called Carmen lead to her degradation and untimely demise.Read More »

After World War II, many important figures in Hitler’s command escaped Germany and were rumored to be living in South America. Adolf Eichmann, wanted in connection with millions of deaths, is suspected to be living incognito in Argentina. Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence organization is determined to bring Eichmann (if it is him indeed) to justice.Read More »

Quote:
Clint Eastwood returns to his popular Dirty Harry character and directs himself in the role for the first time. The film starts with Harry leaving San Francisco at his superiors’ insistence and going to a small seaside town for a little peace and quiet. There he becomes embroiled in a series of brutal murders committed by a young artist, Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke). She and her sister were raped by a group of local men, including the police chief’s son, a few years back. The experience left Jennifer’s sister completely catatonic, and Jennifer herself is tormented by flashbacks. While Harry investigates the killings, he falls in love with Jennifer, not knowing that she is committing the murders. Sudden Impact is a disturbing film in which Eastwood examines the darker aspects of Dirty Harry and comes up with a brooding, grim drama that has a hauntingly ambiguous ending.Read More »

From Allmovie:
A wildly inventive and entertaining comic nightmare from former Roger Corman prodigy Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), this screwball odyssey is a ride to remember. Jeff Daniels plays clean-cut New York bond trader Charlie Driggs, who accepts a ride home from a strange but attractive lower-class woman named Lulu (Melanie Griffith). The sexy Louise Brooks lookalike doesn’t take him home, but shanghais him for a bizarre roadtrip to Virginia that includes kinky bondage sex, destruction of property, and robbery. Things get stranger when Lulu tells Charlie that her real name is Audrey and takes him home to meet her mother, asking him to pose as her husband.Read More »

This period piece by Polish director Agnieszka Holland is one of her most successful Hollywood ventures. It’s the second film adaptation of the Henry James novel, but strikes a very different, more feminist and acutely observed, note than William Wyler’s The Heiress, its gaudy 1949 predecessor.

Catherine (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is the plain and socially awkward daughter of wealthy Dr Austin Sloper (Albert Finney). Sloper came into his fortune by marrying a rich woman whose death giving birth to Catherine has permanently embittered him against her.Read More »

Jean Evans (Phyllis Coates) – who is referred to as Panther Girl by the natives – is a daring wild life photographer working out of the wilds of Western Africa. Her work for the International Foundation quickly becomes of the utmost importance when a brand new species of massive crayfish is discovered! This means that Jean is now tasked with getting some footage to send back – but when it comes to shooting giant crayfish, that’s easier than it sounds. As such, she enlists the aid of her intrepid explorer friend, Larry Sanders (Myron Healey).Read More »

Synopsis:
Set against the background of the Battle of Waterloo, Becky Sharp is the story of Vanity Fair by Thackeray. Becky and Amelia are girls at school together, but Becky is from a “show biz” family, or in other words, very low class. Becky manages to insinuate herself in Amelia’s family and gets to know all their friends. From this possibly auspicious- beginning, she manages to ruin her own life, becoming sick, broke, and lonely, and also ruins the lives of many other “loved ones”. In the movie we get to see the class distinctions in England at the time, and get a sense of what it was like for the English military at the time of the Napoleonic wars.Read More »