Bizarre foray into horror by the gifted Alan Rudolph just before he became Robert Altman’s protégé. (Rudolph would go on to direct such brilliant films as Welcome to LA, Choose Me, The Moderns, and Trouble in Mind.) This is a real find and consistent with the kind of thing Code Red champions. (CR gave us THE ideal scan of the indispensable Messiah of Evil.) The film concerns the deranged mind of a young man known only as André who has…
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High Spirits 1988
Neil Jordan’s Shakespearean comedy-horror confection. This followed his third film, the extraordinarily beautiful and violent Mona Lisa; if you didn’t understand anything about his Irish sensibility, you’d never know the same director made this. Scenes feel truncated or missing, wonderful characters and potentially great diversions—especially the romance between Peter Gallagher as a faith-questioning priest and Jennifer Tilly as a curvy, ready-for-anything sexpot—go nowhere, and there’s a palpable lack of conviction on the director’s part whenever slapstick is called for. Yet…
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Vertigo 1958
Among its many virtues is its stunning evocation of obsession—of obsession’s unsavory ability to change a relatively average person into a monster. Arguably Hitchcock’s greatest American film, Vertigo is the chief inspiration for another near masterwork, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. It also features Bernard Herrmann’s most brilliant film score—which is really saying something; indeed, it is arguably the greatest film score of all time.
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Dreamchild 1985
Gavin Miller’s adaptation of Dennis Potter’s Dreamchild is a beautiful piece of work, marred slightly by an irrelevant romance that still manages to have charms of its own, due to the beautiful playing of Peter Gallagher and Nicola Cowper. The film stars the superlative Coral Browne as Alice Hargreaves née Liddell, whose uneasy relationship in her youth with the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She is now 80 and going to the…
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