Not as randy as the filmmaker's sausagefest STRANGER BY THE LAKE (13) this is still suffused with backwoods perversity but pitched very quietly, as a funeral for a baker exposes tensions among his family members and a visitor, a former employee. There's roiling sexuality at play but the boundaries of propriety are literally policed after a murder occurs, and an abbott watches over the guilty party. None of these people are terribly attractive (the lead, desired and infuriating in equal…
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Holy Cow 2024
The winner of last year's Youth Prize at Cannes is an appealing coming of age story set in the cheesemaking province of Jura, about an 18-year-old forced to give up an indolent, insolent life of beer, cigs, and screwing around with girls when his dad dies and he has to raise his kid sister on his own. Making a prizewinning cheese seems like an easy answer to his cash flow problem...except that, knowing little other than beer, cigs, and screwing…
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Grand Slam 1967
Later heist movies like OCEAN’S ELEVEN (01) stripped this down for spare parts but it’s still good fun in its Euro-production way, if “deliberately paced” as they say. It might have made greater use of Ennio Morricone’s score but Rio at Carnival, Janet Leigh, and Edward G. Robinson in the “caper” phase of his career have their charms, while Klaus Kinski does some of the heavy lifting on the job. Robinson and Adolfo Celi hash out the crime together, the meeting of KEY LARGO and “Thunderball” Largo.
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The Glass Web 1953
Did any other Golden Age filmmaker direct as many 3D features as Jack Arnold? Maybe--but I doubt any other made four good ones. Minus the sci-fi/horror elements of IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (53), CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (54), and REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (55) this entertaining, noir-inflected mystery (his second in the format) stars John Forsythe as an overworked writer on a weekly true crime show whose affair with a blackmailing vamp (scene-stealing Kathleen Hughes) winds up fodder…
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Saint Jack 1979
A cable favorite in my teens, finally available in a good quality DVD, anamorphically enhanced at last. (Why no Blu-ray?) Its frank, febrile atmosphere is one of those things that got me to Asia, though Singapore was a disappointingly authoritarian place by the time I got there. There's nothing disappointing about the film, though, Bogdanovich's return to movies after a string of flops, a Paul Theroux adaptation made with a dummy script to fool the authorities into thinking it was…
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The Quiller Memorandum 1966
An underrated entry in the "anti-Bond" subgenre, with George Segal (excellent) sleuthing neo-Nazis in West Berlin. Could the exceptionally beautiful Senta Berger be one of them? Screenwriter Harold Pinter cloaks all answers in ambiguity, so much so that the film, with its constant codes, hideaways, and wordplay, is practically a metaphor for closeted homosexuality. (Is Berger "bearding" Segal or the dictatorial Max von Sydow?) Anderson directs very smoothly, wasting nothing in the Panavision frame (the film made little sense panned/scanned on The 4:30 Movie back in the day in NYC). The Twilight Time Blu-ray is terrific (ignore reports of "teal screencaps") and retains the DVD commentary.
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