CQ (2001) Director/Screenwriter: Roman Coppola By Roderick Heath Damn Francis Ford Coppola and his talented family! Even if, Nicholas Cage excluded (sometimes), they’re entirely preferable behind the camera to in front of it, they’ve still managed to brew many a sour grape into critical wine. Daughter Sofia, of course, survived being skinned alive a trifle excessively for her acting in The Godfather Part III (1990) to become, to my mind, the most interesting American director under 40 toda... Read Full Story

Skhizein (2008) Director/Screenwriter/Animator: Jérémy Clapin By Marilyn Ferdinand To be “beside oneself” is a turn of phrase we’ve all heard or used at one time or another. It usually refers to someone experiencing something very emotionally charged. Of course, the part of that phrase that most people don’t think much about is that the emotion literally drives one out of one’s body. If you’ve ever witnessed a car wreck or been threatened with serious physical harm, as I have, you’ll be ... Read Full Story

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Director: Stanley Kubrick By Roderick Heath Legendary and lauded as most of them have become, few of Stanley Kubrick’s later films landed immediate punches with viewers. 2001: A Space Odyssey took time to find an audience, A Clockwork Orange was so controversial in its time Kubrick removed it from British cinemas, Barry Lyndon remains largely unloved, and The Shining underperformed badly on first release, catching neither the Oscar-bait nor the Friday the 13th crowds... Read Full Story

Amityville 2: The Possession (1982) Director: Damiano Damiani By Roderick Heath Long my private vote for the best worst film of all time, Amityville 2: The Possession is the sort of film that ought to be utterly humdrum, but proves to be a welter of cinematic putrescence. A sequel to a big hit and a big enough hit itself to justify another sequel (Richard Fleischer’s Amityville 3-D, far better than either precursor), it still managed to be badly acted, tackily directed, photographed with e... Read Full Story

The Class of ’84 Blogathon Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) Director/Screenwriter: Michael Radford By Marilyn Ferdinand This entry is part of the Class of ’84 Blogathon being hosted by Joe Valdez at This Distracted Globe. Big Brother is watching you. Whether you’ve ever read a word, or even heard of George Orwell’s seminal dystopian tale 1984, the above iconic quote is certain to have chilled your heart at some time or another. I’m not even sure this quote occurs in the book. It certainly... Read Full Story

Italian Horror Blog-a-Thon Deep Red (Profondo Rosso, 1975) Director/Co-Screenwriter: Dario Argento By Roderick Heath This entry is part of the Italian Horror Blog-a-Thon hosted by Kevin J. Olson of Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies. If there’s a problem with Suspiria, often regarded as the high point of Dario Argento’s career, it’s that the bare-bones characterisations and equally minimal storyline build in off-kilter style to a bit of an anticlimax. By contrast, Deep Red offers a veritable banq... Read Full Story

Bonjour Tristesse (1958) Director: Otto Preminger By Roderick Heath Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan’s famous debut novel is a pseudo-tragic morality play flavoured with haute-couture raciness and 10-franc philosophy. Nonetheless, it was a perceptive work that hit a nerve, all the more so for its author’s youth: Sagan, who took her pen name from a character of Marcel Proust’s, was 18 when she wrote it. Otto Preminger’s film version came out four years later. Preminger was a forceful, i... Read Full Story

Under Milk Wood (1972) Director/Screenwriter: Andrew Sinclair By Roderick Heath This oddball, fitfully engaging, inevitably unsatisfying piece of work attempts to convert Dylan Thomas’s elegiac, often lethally funny “play for voices” into a movie. Thomas’s work, with its rolling, repetitive cadences, was always based intrinsically in verbal culture, and the play was written precisely for the vocal medium of radio, employing Thomas’s poetics in evoking a satiric yet beatific portrait of... Read Full Story

2009 Chicago International Film Festival What I Did for Love By Marilyn Ferdinand Last night, finally free to watch whatever movie I wanted, I popped in Every Little Step, a 2008 documentary about casting the 2006 Broadway remounting of that singular sensation A Chorus Line. The film reminds us of the very hard work it is to be a triple threat on Broadway and then to beat out 8,000 people for one role. The song that exemplifies the dedication this kind of career takes is “What I Did for Lov... Read Full Story

2009 Chicago International Film Festival A Single Man (2009) Director/Screenwriter: Tom Ford By Marilyn Ferdinand A lot has been made about superstar fashion designer Tom Ford entering the movie business with his own production company, Fade to Black. Now we have Fade to Black’s first film and Ford’s directorial debut, an adaptation of the 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel A Single Man. Although Ford costumed Colin Firth, who plays the title character George Falconer, and his eye for fas... Read Full Story