In 1933, at the height of the Depression, a nation in desperate need of distraction broke box office records for the lavish Hollywood musical 42nd Street. This unabashed slice of wish fulfillment is an undisputed cinematic classic, the granddaddy of all Hollywood backstage musicals, and now out on Blu-ray courtesy Warner Archives. Theater director Julian…
“Boy,” I can hear you saying now, “I can’t believe no one made a movie that was a cross between Laura, Mildred Pierce and All About Eve.” Well, folks, I am here to make your day: The Velvet Touch, the 1948 drama starring Rosalind Russell, is indeed a mix of murder-based melodrama, set in the…
Skin Trade ★★✫✫✫ Director: Ekachai Uekrongtham Magnet Releasing (Official Site) 96 Minutes Release Date: May 8, 2015 (limited) – Newark police officer Nick (Dolph Lundgren) has spent years hunting down the Serbian family responsible for a large human trafficking operation. On the other side of the world, officer Tony Vitayakul (Tony Jaa) is after the…
The Flying Cloud, a ship out of New York, lands in San Francisco after over 100 days at sea. The sole female passenger, one Miss Mary Rutledge (Miriam Hopkins), is cynical and aloof, and upon her arrival in the town, it’s no wonder: she’s essentially a mail-order bride sent to marry a man she doesn’t…
Private Number ★★★★✫ Director: LazRael Lison Arc Entertainment (Official Site) 95 Minutes Release Date: May 1, 2015 (limited) – Thirty-somethings Michael and Katherine Lane are, on the surface, a perfectly normal couple. Michael (Hal Ozsan) is a writer of fantasy fiction with one moderate seller under his belt, Katherine (Nicholle Tom) runs a small boutique,…
Sketch comedy films, the spiritual descendants of 1930s cinematic musical extravaganzas and 1960s television variety shows, hit their peak popularity in the 1970s. Monty Python’s And Now For Something Completely Different, Woody Allen’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex, and the inaugural Zucker-Abrams-Zucker outing Kentucky Fried Movie captured the free-wheeling irreverence of the…
24 Days (24 jours) ★★★★✫ Director: Alexandre Arcady Menemsha Films (Official Site) 110 Minutes Release Date: April 24, 2015 (limited) – It’s Paris, 2006, and handsome young Ilan Halimi (Syrus Shahidi) has been kidnapped, his family tortured by angry phone calls demanding €450,000 for his release. If the Halimis were a rich family, this might…
Everyone loves a good bad movie, but not every bad movie works as a late-night laugh-a-thon. As the crew of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” explained in Wired‘s oral history of the show, they couldn’t just pick any old bad movie to riff. The films couldn’t be “boring and really, really talky,” and they had to…
That Guy Dick Miller ★★★★✫ Director: Elijah Drenner Indiecan Entertainment (Official Site) 91 Minutes Release Date: April 3, 2015 (limited) / Available on VOD and DVD May 19, 2015 – That Guy Dick Miller is an affectionate documentary that takes us through the life and career of, well, Dick Miller, the character actor who, for…
If early Hollywood films are any indication, a good 47% of women by volume found themselves abandoned, unmarried and pregnant at some point in their lives. They rarely suffered much by way of social ostracism — there was almost always a progressive aunt or someone willing to pass the child off as their own —…