Editorial Board Member, Cineaste Magazine.
Member, Drama Desk.
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* Bomb
** Of interest
*** Good
**** Excellent
***** Masterpiece
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Jurassic World Dominion 2022
The sixth and final series entry is easily the weakest, and also a bait and switch. The DINOTOPIA-style interaction that dominated the trailers is only a small part of the actual film, and largely confined to (badly done) news reports that bookend it. (The "drive-in" T-rex isn't there at all.) Instead we get...bad guy Campbell Scott (leading the most poorly run nefarious corporation in film history) attempting to corner the world food market with football-sized locusts he deploys from a…
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The Brain from Planet Arous 1957
How could a movie featuring not one but two floating space brains be so...half-witted? But it's a lot of fun, as the bad one takes possession of nuclear scientist John Agar and has sex on the brain regarding his fiancée Joyce Meadows, and the good one trying to thwart his plans of galactic conquest hides out in Agar's dog. (Both are played by balloons, all too clearly moved by wires in the excellent Blu-ray transfer, which is available in two…
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Bell from Hell 1973
This superior Spanish psycho thriller is doubly cursed--its director died in a fall from a key location, the bell tower, before he could finish it, and the home video versions are mostly lousy (some are cut, presumably of the slaughterhouse violence; what's streaming on Tubi doesn't appear to be, but the quality's subpar). Worth watching, however, in hope of something better.
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Saint Jack 1979
A cable favorite in my teens, finally available in a good quality DVD, anamorphically enhanced at last. (Why no Blu-ray?) Its frank, febrile atmosphere is one of those things that got me to Asia, though Singapore was a disappointingly authoritarian place by the time I got there. There's nothing disappointing about the film, though, Bogdanovich's return to movies after a string of flops, a Paul Theroux adaptation made with a dummy script to fool the authorities into thinking it was…
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Sands of the Kalahari 1965
Endfield's followup to the hit ZULU isn't the baboon horror movie I'd always thought; they're there, but until the coda mostly in the background, observing plane crash survivors go ape over the female (Susannah York) in their party and their dwindling prospects. The sexual politics are 1965, but all credit due the film for detailing them, as York passes from the loutish pilot (Nigel Davenport) to the brutish alpha male (Stuart Whitman) to an injured, initially diffident fellow passenger (Stanley…
