Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Last Flight 1931

  Watched 05 Oct 2012

  Poor* (Dated, but occasionally interesting early sound film inspired by, but not credited to, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, about four World War I fliers self-exiled in Paris and of their attempts to adjust to a new life. Helen Chandler gives a particularly effective performance, but Dieterle - this was his first American film - is a quickly uninteresting director, quite uninspired, often tedious, impersonal. This is better than most of his later work, which isn't saying much. Hawks' airplane footage - borrowed from The Dawn Patrol - is, finally, the best thing in the movie.

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  The Other Side of the Wind 2018

  Watched 11 May 2015

  [An article made by Bogdonovich to help fund a Indigogo campaign to finish The Other Side of the Wind. The campaign failed but it was eventually funded and released by Netflix in 2018. Here is the article which has some backstory on the film itself]

  Orson Welles' Last Picture Show: Peter Bogdanovich on 'The Other Side of the Wind'

  There isn’t a single public appearance I’ve made over the last thirty years during which I wasn’t asked about Orson Welles’…

Popular reviews

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  The Crowd 1928

  Watched 21 Feb 2016

  Added 2016: (This gets my highest rating: it is one of the truly great films ever made, and it wasn’t a hit. But it is extremely moving and easily translated into modern terms, which means it isn’t really dated at all. There are memorable shots throughout that tell the story visually, and the performances are simple and superb. They seem captured by accident rather than acted. If you want to convince someone of the glory of the silent era, show them “The Crowd,” made in the final extraordinary year of non-talking pictures. As Chaplin said: “Just when we got it right, it was over.”)

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  To Be or Not to Be 1942

  Watched 22 Apr 2012

  Picture of the week:
  Perhaps the first modern black comedy is the one the incomparable Ernst Lubitsch made a couple of years after his most heartwarmingly human film The Shop Around the Corner (1940); I’m referring to that brilliantly mordant satire on actors and Nazis, the 1942 swan’s song for the luminous Carole Lombard, and Jack Benny’s finest big-screen hour, TO BE OR NOT TO BE (available on DVD).

  Lombard’s shocking death at age 33 in a plane accident shortly…