4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on June 19, 2024

Before he became a caricature of his former self, even before the days of Captain Kirk and pop culture canonization, The Intruder is a reminder of something else in William Shatner. He still feels ripe and almost dangerous with a charisma that has yet to be calcified or even corroded...   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on June 17, 2024

Keir Dullea is an actor who will always be most prominently remembered for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He’s Dave of pod door fame. However, part of me wants to promote him as the lead in David and Lisa because this film from Frank Perry, in its quiet empathy...   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on June 15, 2024

The aesthetic of The Little Fugitive is made plain thanks to chalk drawing credits playing over “Home on The Range.” We are about to enter a little boy’s world with all the joys and menial problems an adolescent life engenders. The key is giving these problems credence. Because in   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on June 8, 2024

Nobuhiko Obayashi is known to a pocket of western moviegoers for his crazy, unhinged haunted house flick Hausu (1977), but as I’ve gotten more familiar with at least some of his filmography, I’ve come to appreciate his more grounded works. Using this phrase has the danger of giving the w   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on May 20, 2024

This is my entry in the Spring CMBA Blogathon Debuts and Last Hurrahs. In the isolated occasions when I had to debate in high school history classes those who did this kind of thing for fun and seemed most destined for politics , were all people I would never want...   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on April 24, 2024

Rooney, Gleason, and Quinn in the film version Requiem for a Heavyweight was an early live television production that was so popular it garnered a feature-length adaptation a few years later. It’s relatively easy to see the merits in both because although they enlisted the same director and sc   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on April 22, 2024

As the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall and Toro is a big man. He’s a sculptable Argentinian bumpkin who will quickly be fashioned into a killer in the boxing ring. Rod Steiger plays Nick Benko, a shifty promoter looking to groom his latest talent and set...   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on April 8, 2024

Zone of Interest opens with a blank screen and a collage of sound; it’s almost like it’s priming us for the movie ahead. Because it’s not a conventional movie by any stretch of the imagination. It’s difficult to put arbitrary labels like good and bad on it since it’s so   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on March 25, 2024

We’ve been doing a rather casual retrospective on the films of George Sanders and as part of the series, we thought it would be fitting to highlight three more of his performances. They run the gamut of literary adaptations, fantasy romances, and medieval yarns. Sanders remains his incorrigib   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on March 23, 2024

This Land in Mine initiates itself as a memorial to WWI. We see a statue with a crouching soldier. It’s inscribed with the following message: “In memory of those who died to bring peace to the world.” In the foreground as the Nazi juggernaut rolls into town. Because peace has...   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on March 21, 2024

A place with a name like Okefenokee feels immanently American and this is an inherently American story though expatriate Jean Renoir feels sympathetic to these types of folks. He wasn’t a working-class filmmaker but in movies from his home country like Toni or La Bete Humaine, you see his con   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on March 19, 2024

I feel like few filmmakers understood the menace of the Nazis as well as Fritz Lang. Perhaps it’s because he had firsthand experience, and he knew their schemes and what they were capable of — at least to a degree. But he does not make them total fools nor distant...   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on February 15, 2024

Seeing the Twin Towers on celluloid always brings a bit of a wistful reaction because there presence represents so much. It feels like a line in the sand and there are those who know that far better than me. The last time I recall having this sense was watching Peter...   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on February 13, 2024

If you’re a bit of a finicky nerd for cultural context like myself, you realize right when we hear Brenton Wood’s “Oogum Boogum Song” wafting down the city street from a car radio, we can carbon-date the scene to around 1967. A marine steps off a bus with a slight...   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on February 8, 2024

Peter Bogdanovich lost his girlfriend Dorothy Stratten to tragedy in 1981 and after the release of their picture together, They All Laughed, it was anyone’s guess if he’d ever be able to return to directing. I’ve heard an often-repeated anecdote that he ultimately decided to take   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on February 6, 2024

I know only very little about River Phoenix’s upbringing but somehow it’s easy for me to make the leap from his real-life existence to his family in this movie. Running on Empty has to do with an unconventional upbringing. Danny Pope (that’s his real name) has grown up with his...   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on February 1, 2024

Pump Up The Volume is a movie that tackles the existential malaise of the generation beyond After Hours and Something Wild. I’ve never been particularly good at charting the shifts in generational demographics, but the film is definitely an adolescent jeremiad for Gen Xers. In truth, I only l   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on January 11, 2024

“Do you think he drinks?” “He didn’t get that nose from playing ping pong.” Self-reflexive metanarratives have the capacity of dissecting celebrity and playing with personas. Such a context is ripe with possibility and so when we find ourselves on a studio lot with W.C   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on January 9, 2024

When W.C. Fields goes and names his protagonist Egbert Sousé it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to get the joke, although he does spend much of the movie explaining the correct pronunciation. The other half he spends drinking at his favorite bar: The Black Pussy Cat Cafe. His hometown is...   read more

4 Star Films Posted by 4 Star Film Fan on January 6, 2024

I was a bit behind on my movie-watching for 2023, but here is a list of a few movies I enjoyed from the past year. I’ve either linked to a previous review or included a short capsule. Enjoy! Past Lives Writer-director Celine Song’s use of time is self-assured and brazen....   read more