From The New York Times:
The tone of the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award dinner each year is foreshadowed in its opening minutes, when a man or woman whose films ”have stood the test of time” walks past the 1,100 stars, directors, and studio presidents who form his honor court.

Thursday night as he ambled in, the 11th winner of the award, 76-year-old John Huston threw up his arms like a conqueror. ”All of us,” said Orson Welles later in the evening, ”are doomed to play the hero in our own life story” but are haunted by the fear that a understudy will somehow take over. John Huston, he added, could never be overtaken by an understudy.Read More »

Cambrai, a modest captain in the French secret service, discovers that his superior, Colonel Toulouse, was responsible for the death of his rival Milan. To cover his tracks, Toulouse immediately sends two hit-men to Rio de Janeiro to eliminate François Perrin, the innocent “grand blond” who was instrumental in Toulouse’s scheme to remove Milan. When Perrin miraculously survives, Toulouse changes his strategy. He takes Perrin into his confidence and attempts to convert him into an ace secret agent, thereby discrediting Cambrai and proving that he is innocent of Milan’s death. When his beloved Christine is abducted by Toulouse’s agents, Perrin has no other choice. Indeed, he seems to relish the prospect of becoming a real-life James Bond…Read More »

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A young woman, Louise, is a lecturer in a provincial town where she meets an Italian immigrant. The film retraces their relationship.Read More »

A pretty young nurse is hired to take care of a bedridden young man at a private mansion. She soon discovers that the estate is a hotbed of sexual depravity nd excesses, and that she and the other nurses are expected to provide the kind of services that they didn’t learn in nursing school.Read More »

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A story about stolen love and stolen identities, literally shot on stolen film… Momma’s Man writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ effortlessly hip second feature is an absurdist comedy of errors, a punk-rock slice of DIY rebellion, and a warmhearted frolic that captures the “amour fou spirit of the early French New Wave” (The Village Voice).Read More »

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As if it weren’t obvious already, Raoul Walsh’s Strawberry Blonde confirms what most men have known for decades: Betty’s always a better choice than Veronica. This charming comedy starring James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, and Rita Hayworth may be over 80 years old — and it mostly takes place in the 1890s — but it’s still as accessible as ever, providing you don’t mind overused music cues and/or extended flashbacks. It’s the kind of crowd-pleasing fare that’s solid enough for “movie night” yet equally easy to enjoy as a light and breezy afternoon matinee.Read More »

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In “La perdición de los hombres”, Ripstein once again enters the world of misery, though his characters are not precisely outcasts as the fat nurse and her gigolo lover. This time he returns to his early free-style -it’s even in black and white-, as he tells the stories of normal people, who choose weird solutions to their predicaments and whose dreams occupy the same space and tone as their daily actions on the screen. Garciadiego rarely paints a “nice” male character. So here there are not only one but three machos, who play baseball and believe that man’s downfall is personified in women (in fact, the movie’s title is a verse from a popular ranchera that goes “Man’s downfall / Is the damned woman”). Garciadiego built her story a la “Pulp Fiction”, with the first act told after the resolution, so one has to wait quite a bit to know why two of the guys kill their pal, known as the “King of the Baseball Diamond”, while his widow fights for his corpse with his younger and prettier lover.Read More »

Housewife Christine M. tries to shoplift some merchandise from a boutique in a shopping mall but is caught by the male shopkeeper. Christine and two other customers, waitress Annie and secretary Anna, beat the man to death, witnessed by a large group of other female shoppers. They are tried with murder and deny the plea of insanity that the male prosecutor and judges assume they should plead. The female criminal psychiatrist assigned to ascertain their level of sanity comes to identify with the women’s situations and concludes that they are not insane but have been driven to murder by the strain of living in a patriarchy. This feminist drama in which a Woman Psychiatrist is appointed by the Court to investigate the sanity of three women, all strangers, for beating a male boutique owner to death.Read More »

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Most actors, especially established stars, yearn for roles that allow them to stretch their performance muscles and play against type. Most big stars who attained their status in the heyday of the studio system often found themselves stifled by typecasting, especially if they enjoyed overwhelming success in any given role. Studio executives weren’t about to risk placing an established property in something unexpected, and if the paying public had shown their approval by lining up at the box office for, say, Tyrone Power as a swashbuckling hero, then Tyrone Power as a swashbuckling hero is exactly what the public would be offered. Read More »