IMDb wrote:
A producer decides to reopen a theater, that had been closed five years previously when one of the actors was murdered during a performance, by staging a production of the same play with the remaining members of the original cast.Read More »
by Hans J. Wollstein
Touching on both the film noir style of the 1940s and the “just the facts, ma’am” approach popular in the early television era, and incorporating both shadowy alleys and bright, almost flat sunlit street scenes, Richard Fleischer’s plebeian, no-nonsense Armored Car Robbery remains the quintessential low-budget heist melodrama. Starring tight-lipped Charles McGraw as the tough, unyielding police detective, the potboiler also benefited from a downright vicious performance by an unredeemable William Talman as the brains behind the ill-fated caper, as well as the presence of luscious B-movie icon Adele Jergens as one of those hardboiled dames seemingly born to destroy gullible dime-store gangsters like Benny McBride (Douglas Fowley).Read More »
Lucy, (Anna Biller) a young Victorian woman in the Old West, is being tormented by nightly visits from an incubus (a horrible demon who has sexual intercourse with sleeping women). Her friend Madeleine (Natalia Schroeder) tries to console her, but is unable to help. A fallen woman, Lucy gets a job singing at the local saloon. However, the Incubus (Jared Sanford) has followed her there; and things take an unexpected turn as Lucy and the Incubus, amidst the rowdy cowboys and saucy can-can girls, have their final showdown. With beautiful period costumes and sets by director Anna Biller that are borrowed from 1950’s Technicolor films, plus big hairdos, weird musical numbers, and plenty of great character actors, this Horror-Western-Musical has all of the elements of a cult classic.Read More »
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A transgender punk-rock girl from East Berlin tours the U.S. with her band as she tells her life story and follows the former lover/band-mate who stole her songs.Read More »
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While perhaps too consciously schematic in its pairing of a black man and a blind white girl during an era of heightened racial awareness, this small film is a tender and moving story of friendship. Sidney Poitier stars as a man who befriends a blind girl (Elizabeth Hartman) he often sees in the park, and as he comes to understand the harshness of her family life, encourages her to reach out for a better life.Read More »
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Filmmaker William Greaves auditioned acting students for a fictional drama, while simultaneously shooting the behind-the-scenes drama taking place.
Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:
Seeing this singular 1968 American experimental feature by William Greaves a second time (on video; the first time was in 1980, in its original 35-millimeter format) has led me to value it more, though arguably the fact that it loses relatively little impact on video constitutes one of its limitations. Greaves, a pioneering black actor whose career stretches back to postwar films made for black audiences as well as the underrated Hollywood feature Lost Boundaries, went on to direct over 200 documentaries, host and executive produce NET’s Black Journal, and teach acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. Read More »
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Legendary filmmaker Hal Ashby (Coming Home, 8 Million Ways to Die) makes his directing debut with this acclaimed social satire starring Beau Bridges (The Hotel New Hampshire) as a wealthy young man who leaves his family’s estate in Long Island to pursue love and happiness in a Brooklyn ghetto. When Elgar Enders (Bridges) buys a Park Slope tenement, he fully intends to evict the occupants and transform the building into a chic bachelor pad. But after meeting the tenants, Elgar adopts a “love thy neighbor” policy instead: first he falls head-over-heels for a sexy young go-go dancer… then he begins an affair with the sultry, married “Miss Sepia 1957.” Read More »
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Writer-director-pouter Anna Biller’s influences are as naked as her delightfully curvaceous body is in the riotous 1970s throwback Viva. Biller’s film is to the films of Radley Metzger and Russ Meyer what Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven was to Douglas Sirk, only perhaps a little bit cannier and a lot less dryly academic about its postmodern tweaks; if Haynes looked back at the 1950s by making his own Rock Hudson update a blue-blooded queer, Viva revisits the golden age of stag filmmaking by putting its likely audience (bored suburbanites with a 16mm projector in their shag-carpeted basement dens) in the starring roles.Read More »
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My Brother’s Wedding is a tragic comedy that takes place in South Central Los Angeles. The story focuses on a young man who hasn’t made much of his life as of yet, and at a crucial point in his life, he is unable to make the proper decision, a sober decision, a moral decision. This is a consequence of his not having developed beyond the embryonic stage, socially. He has a distinct romantic notion about life in the ghetto and yet, in spite of his naive sensitivity, he is given the task of being his brother’s keeper; he feels rather than sees, and as a consequence his capacity for judging things off in the distance is limited. This brings about circumstances that weave themselves into a set of complexities which Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas), the main character, desperately tries to avoid.Read More »