Cinema Mishmash

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While a lot of attention will be given to the fact that director Brian Caunter and his Columbia College Chicago colleagues landed the very recognizable Frank Vincent (The Sopranos, Goodfellas, etc.) for their feature debut, I was more excited to see the late cameo by Stacey Keach. There wasn’t an art house cinema in my hometown, [...]

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Behind the scenes of Surveillance sits an underdog story with considerable appeal.  A staggering 15 years passed between Jennifer Lynch’s directorial debut feature, Boxing Helena, and this, her second effort. Despite its patent absurdity, I rather fondly recall Boxing Helena, a film which is perhaps underrated due to its inability to stand up next to the [...]

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One of the biggest assets that Woody Allen has as a director is his ability to assemble a tremendous array of talent for his pictures. Just about any actor seems to jump at the chance to be able to say he or she was in a Woody Allen picture, and as a result, some of [...]

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While the idea of a Technicolor film noir sounds as ridiculous as a G-rated sex comedy, 1945’s Leave Her to Heaven makes the notion seem perfectly natural. Trading in the low-angle, high-contrast, black-and-white photography for the  soft-focus color saturation of Technicolor, Gene Tierney and Cornel Wilde star as femme fatale and the schmuck she marries and, wait [...]

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Demonstrating further that technicolor is the perfect vehicle for a melodrama in noir’s clothing, Desert Fury could be the seedy west’s answer to Rebel Without a Cause, had it not been made eight years before James Dean flashed his scowl. While the typical noir would be set in the cutthroat shadows of the cold city, Desert Fury is set [...]

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Made in a time when “clever” was an understood description for a comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets tells the outlandish story of the murderous ambition of Louis (Dennis Price), whose mother was cruelly disinherited for marrying beneath her. Now an adult, Louis hatches a plan to ascend to the Dukedom of her mother’s family by eliminating the eight [...]

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In what is essentially a slick, movie-length “CSI: Saudi Arabia,” The Kingdom combines the standard action flick with the forensic whodunnit and shakes it up with some international diplomatic intrigue.  There is something cathartic about a blow-em-up, shoot-em-up flick that is reasonably well constructed, and director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Hancock) is a technically skilled, confident [...]

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De Niro. Pacino. Yawn.
I moaned and scoffed at the trailer for Righteous Kill, not knowing that, by some stroke of ignorance or poor judgment, the film was in our rental queue and would arrive in our mailbox two days later. I wish I would have just mailed it back. Whoever decided that it would be the [...]

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Opening an impressive and ambitious slate of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center’s 12th Annual European Union Film Festival is a light-hearted con-artist caper from the Czech Republic, I’m All Good. The time is 1993, at the very beginning of the economic boom that swept across most of Europe. The film is set mostly [...]

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Two words that surely described Japanese director Takeshi Miike are prolific and unpredictable. While there are stylistic threads that can be discerned in much of his work, few directors can claim a body of work that spans such a large swath of the cinematic universe. He’s the filmmaking equivalent of that nineties TV series, The Pretender, [...]

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For all of the outrage, frustration, and horror evoked by the actual events that inspired Changeling, there is something about director Clint Eastwood’s creation that left me cold. In part I think it is the casting of Angelina Jolie as the single mother whose nine-year-old son disappears one afternoon, only to have a boy clearly not [...]

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