Recent reviews

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  Scared Stiff 1953

  ★★★ Added

  Still working my way through some of the late Jerry Lewis, this is one of the more amusing vehicles he did earlier in his career with Dean Martin. I find the film especially endearing because Lewis, as the anxious and clinging friend of night club singer Martin, spends much of the 108 minutes calling out, "Larry, Larry!"and I can't recall another film in which my name is shouted out so much, and so lovingly. It's a remake, by the same…

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  Head Against the Wall 1959

  ★★★★ Added

  I want to salute the 3 auteurs of this lovely film about a troubled young man forced into a repressive mental institution, First, novelist Herve Bazin (apparently no relation to Andre) whose troubled family and own such confinement inspired the book (I'm not sure how much of his work is in English translation) Second, aspiring young rebel actor and budding filmmaker Jean Pierre Mocky, whose own family history (Poles put in concentration camps) motivated him to adapt, star in, cast,…

Popular reviews

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  Four Women 2007

  ★★★½ Added

  Of the 10 or so features, and 30 documentaries that Kerala based filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan has made, I have only seen this and the much earlier, 1981, Rat-Trap, which seemed to me somewhat derivative of my favorite Satyajit Ray, The Music Room. (Somewhere I thought I'd seen a quote from Ray in Sight and Sound singling out Gopalakrishnan as one of the 3 best Indian directors, but now I can't find it.) Like another Ray, Three Daughters, this 2007 film…

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  The Revolutionary 2011

  ★★★ Added

  This documentary on Sidney Rittenberg doesn't do anything special in terms of film form but as a mostly long interview (90 minutes) with its subject it is a fascinating study of the kind of political extremist who Sam Fuller would have been drawn to for a character. An American who attended college right here in Chapel Hill, Rittenberg studied Chinese, which it turned out he loved and became fluent in, in preparation for being sent by the US Army to…

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