USA

Filmreference review
“Critical judgment remains sharply divided on Intolerance, D. W. Griffith’s most expensive and flamboyant spectacle. Those critics who pronounce the film a failure generally point to the four stories, which, they claim, are thematically too diverse to be effectively collated. Taking their cue from Eisenstein’s famous indictment, they argue that the film suffers from purposeless fragmentation and thematic incoherence. Others, notably Vachel Lindsay, Georges Sadoul, Edward Wagenknecht, and more recently Pauline Kael, list Intolerance among the masterworks, stressing its formal complexity, experimental daring, and thematic richness. René Clair, taking a middle position, writes, “it combines extraordinary lyric passages, realism, and psychological detail, with nonsense, vulgarity, and painful sentimentality.”Read More »

Previously filmed in 1926 the George Kelly stage comedy The Show-Off was remade in
1930 as Men Are Like That. Broadway star Hal Skelly steps into the role of chronic braggart
Aubrey Piper, incapable of either telling the truth or shutting up. Insinuating himself into the
home of his wife Amy’s (Doris Hill) family, Aubrey does his best to impress his in-laws with
tall tales about his business acumen and his grandiose financial transactions. Even after
he’s been exposed as a fraud and saved from ruin and disgrace by Amy, Aubrey continues
to run off at the mouth — and even throws in a few songs and dances for good measure.
Despite a witty script by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Men Are Like That is sabotaged by the
calculatedly obnoxious Hal Skelly, who never did develop into a satisfying screen
personality. The property was refilmed under its original title The Show Off by Spencer
Tracy in 1934, and by Red Skelton in 1948.Read More »

AMG: The low-budget, direct-to-video erotic drama Kissing on the Mouth explores the erogenous trials and travails of a clique of college grads. It concerns Ellen, a young woman sleeping with her ex-boyfriend and bucking his attempts to re-instigate a serious romantic commitment. Meanwhile, she does her best to ignore the increasingly possessive and suspect behavior of her flatmate, Patrick. The film (shot by its cast) is marked by graphic sexual content and frank, explicit discussions of coital behavior. For added realism and authenticity, the directors work in a number of documentary-style interviews with college graduates.Read More »

Don Druker, Chicago Reader wrote:
One of D.W. Griffith’s most beautiful films, a 1919 tale of the chaste love of a Chinese man (Richard Barthelmess) for the frail daughter (Lillian Gish) of a loutish boxer. It perfectly fuses all the elements of Griffith’s style: tender drama played off against scenes of violence; a rich, operatic sense of character and emotion; and a dreamlike acting style, given particular force by the subtlety of Gish’s performance and the strength of Barthelmess’s.Read More »

“Red Bucket Films” wrote:
After months of being alone, sad, busy, sidetracked, free, lofty, late and away from his kids, Lenny, 34 with graying frazzled hair, picks his kids up from school. Every year he spends a couple of weeks with his sons Sage, 9, and Frey, 7. Lenny juggles his kids and everything else all within a midtown studio apartment in New York City. He ultimately faces the choice of being their father or their friend all with the idea that these two weeks must last 6 months.Read More »

This is the 116 min. version that IMDB calls the director’s cut.

The following describes the main differences between the two versions and why two versions were created:
After the film was completed, it was shelved while Warner Bros. worked to release a backlog of war-related films. It was decided that since the war was drawing to a close, public interest in these films would substantially lessened after its conclusion, whereas The Big Sleep had no such obvious issues of time sensitivity which would require a more immediate release. (A careful eye will spot many indications of The Big Sleep being shot during the war, such as ration stamps and dialogue, and pictures of president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.)Read More »

Synopsis
Based on a novel and a disowned script by the late Paddy Chayefsky, Russell’s noisily grandiose swipe at psychedelia embellishes what is no more than the cosily familiar story of the obsessive Scientist Who Goes Too Far and Unwittingly Unleashes, etc. Harvard clever-dick (played with almost unconvincing solemnity by Hurt) blows his sensory deprivation experiments (with a little help from his friends and hallucinogenic drugs), and starts to regress – spectacularly – until he looks in serious danger of being sucked down the cosmic lavatory pan into the big zilch.
Time OutRead More »

These World War II era shorts, produced in the United States and around the world, were never meant to survive past wartime, and understandably many have been shelved, lost or forgotten since the mid-1940s.Fortunately, these films still exist and serve as an interesting social document of the attitudes prevalent at the time some imposed by the government in the form of propaganda and some by the filmmakers.Read More »

Description: Everett McGill stars as a 19th Century sailor whose bizarre facial deformity earns him the name “Iguana.” Beaten and tortured by his shipmates, he escapes to a deserted island where he declares war on all of mankind. Soon, a group of shipwrecked sailors and one kidnapped young maiden are made prisoners of Iguana’s brutal slave empire. In a kingdom ruled by savagery and lust, can these survivors face the greatest evil of all?Read More »