People always mention “Metropolis” and “M” when they talk about German filmmaker Fritz Lang. While they’re both terrific, I personally vouch for “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse”, one of the best movies of the early talkies. Made in 1933, at a time when Nazism was on the rise, […]
Today’s classic film recommendation is Juan Antonio Bardem’s masterful “Death of a Cyclist”, released in the mid 1950’s under the Franco regime. It’s clear that Bardem’s aim was to criticize the huge gap between the poor and the rich, which explains why the movie was censored and Bardem […]
Today I take a trip down memory lane. One of my earliest memories was watching “Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy”, a compilation of silent comedian Harold Lloyd’s very best moments. Lloyd actually edited the film himself, in 1962, exactly 40 years since his first feature film “Grandma’s Boy” was […]
Regarded as the quintessential political satire of the 1960’s, “The Manchurian Candidate” is also meant to provoke paranoia and fear as an American patrol is captured and brainwashed by Chinese communists during the Koran war. One soldier, Raymond Shaw (a terrific Laurence Harvey), has been programmed for a […]
A psychedelic experience from start to finish, Rene Laloux’s richly rewarding “Fantastic Planet” (or “La planète Sauvage” in french) is unlike any animated movie you have ever seen. Set on a distant planet called Ygam where humans (called “Oms” here) are enslaved by giant blue creatures called Draags, […]
Way before “ Boyhood ”, François Roland Truffaut, French film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film critic, as well as one of the founders of the French New Wave, directed “ Les 400 coups ” (“ The 400 blows ”), a childhood movie featuring his own alter ego: Antoine Doinel. Years later, Doinel appears in […]
Watching Ziad El Rahbani’s “Bennesbeh La Bokra Chou?” for the very first time in Beirut was a joy, I daresay a privilege. A play that many people talk about with affection and even passion can finally be seen on the big screen starting January 21 and you can’t possibly […]
One of my favorite Bela Lugosi/Boris Karloff horror movies. In the 1930’s, Universal was the ultimate home of horror, and “The Black Cat” finally brought together the studio’s two great horror stars, Boris Karloff aka The Frankenstein monster, and Bela Lugosi aka Count Dracula, for the first of seven […]
I’ve fallen in love with gangster films made in the 1930’s. Actors like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart were in almost every gangster picture made in that era. And yet it took director Raoul Walsh years before making one of the best gangster films of all time. […]
