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442,530 | 819,382 | 60,218 | 5 | Giant shadow . | I don't know why this movie doesn't work , but it doesn't . I guess I'd hold the writers and the actors responsible - - the direction is efficient and the score good . The script tells us things that most of us already know , without adding much that we didn't . Thankfully it avoid extensive shots of the death camps . ... |
442,854 | 819,382 | 115,710 | 5 | Key : Largo . | The story involves the theft of a multi-million-dollar necklace by thieves Jack Nicholson , who runs a wine shop in Miami , and Michael Caine , a safe cracker on parole . Nicholson packs his suitcase intending to leave his wife , Judy Davis , and his stepson , Steven Dorff , and run off to New York with his innocent gi... |
442,452 | 819,382 | 36,241 | 5 | Her Cups Runneth Over | I don't know if this looks like a Howard Hughes film but it sure looks like Howard Hawks . ( Why do guys whose last names start with H also have first name starting with H , such as Herbert Hoover , not to mention Hubert Horatio Humphrey ? ) We have the sort of sexy non-actress that Hawks was so fond of . How many of h... |
443,437 | 819,382 | 49,656 | 5 | Suspenseful . | This film , " Ransom ! " with an exclamation point ( 1956 ) , is the original from which Ron Howard's " Ransom " wth no exclamation point ( 1996 ) , was derived forty years later . It's not very common for a remake to equal the original - - hell , it's rare ! But in some ways the more recent version beats this one . Th... |
442,834 | 819,382 | 53,462 | 5 | High Society | Richard Powell , on whose novel this movie is based , certainly knew his Philadelphia in the early 20th century . It was tradition bound in the sense that some coastlines are iron bound . And everything that deviated from that tradition was kept under cover because it was a quiet city . No scandals , no engaging corrup... |
441,944 | 819,382 | 51,570 | 5 | Ooogh . | For whatever reason , I kind of enjoyed this . A spider attacks an isolated small town . The kind of thing that would raise the hackles of any news broadcaster goes unremarked at the national level . The spider is a gigantic tarantula . The threatened townspeople are represented by two teen-agers . The local finally ge... |
441,975 | 819,382 | 49,646 | 5 | Inexpensive but effective horror thriller . | Brian Donlevy is a scientist at the head of a space exploration program . One of his rockets returns from space with two of its crew missing and the third in a kind of waking coma . Film from the flight suggests to Donlevy that perhaps there is some life form floating around in space , intelligent , but without matter ... |
442,380 | 819,382 | 31,549 | 5 | Colonial Soap Opera | Robert Taylor whizzes into Saigon with his rich pals and meets wide-eyed , innocent half-caste Hedy Lamarr . The others leave , but Taylor stays behind in his white suit and Panama hat and courts Lamarr , whose mixed racial background makes things difficult for her . For one thing , she can't get a passport . And altho... |
442,462 | 819,382 | 443,706 | 5 | Unfinished Narrative . | The movie industry must be drawn to this story of the San Francisco Bay Area serial murderer like moths to a Klieg light and they always wind up irritated . The Zodiac narrative doesn't fit the required dramatic trajectory . Oh , the elements that have now become conventions are all there in the investigation - - the s... |
442,153 | 819,382 | 31,708 | 5 | Holy Pancakes . | The entries is this series are pretty much alike . Nancy Drew ( Bonita Granville ) , a teen-aged girl , finds some mystery in Riverside Heights and pursues it , despite the warnings of her father and friends , to its happy end . Everything is shot on the cheap on the Warner's back lot . The startling feature of this fi... |
442,210 | 819,382 | 42,897 | 5 | Twilight Zone Unplugged . | A perfectly plausible story of five astronauts who take off in a 1950s space ship , make a wrong turn , and land on Mars instead . After that , things get kind of hairy . I understand this was rushed into production while George Pal's far more lavishly budgeted " Destination Moon " was being shot , with the aim of beat... |
443,479 | 819,382 | 137,523 | 5 | Rebels without a cause . | It's very impressive visually , nicely directed , well acted , scripted in a literate way , and immeasurably depressing . I suppose the plot has been covered in detail elsewhere so I'll keep it brief . The narrator ( Edward Norton ) is a bored , anomic insomniac who doesn't know why he's alive . He runs into a creepy a... |
442,822 | 819,382 | 53,272 | 5 | Time of the Troubles . | A commodius vicus of recirculation brings us back to Howth Castle and environs in 1921 , the time of the Irish revolution , the IRA versus the Black and Tans . But make no mistake . This isn't a sentimental tale about lovers of freedom fighting against the oppressors . It's about as brutal as you can get . And there's ... |
443,327 | 819,382 | 40,000 | 5 | Unpleasant story | I don't know if much would have been made of this had it not been directed by Jean Renoir . It's a strange and confused film . The main characters are Bickford , a blind and embittered ex-artist ; Joan Bennett , his nymphomaniacal wife ; and Ryan , a Coast Guard officer tortured by post-traumatic stress syndrome . ( He... |
442,925 | 819,382 | 445,935 | 5 | Important subject ; routine film . | All these young women are being murdered in and around Juarez . Nobody knows who's doing it or why . ( True enough , though not often noted in the American press . ) The editor of a Chicago newspaper ( Martin Sheen ) sends an ambitious reporter ( Jennifer Lopez ) to Juarez to investigate the events and report back to h... |
443,595 | 819,382 | 174,856 | 5 | Menace 2 Society . | This is the story of a world-famous boxer unjustly imprisoned for more than two decades for felony murders he did not commit . His conviction , upheld in a second trial , before he is finally released by a federal court , is practically an operational definition of the term " railroaded . " Rubin " Hurricane " Carter w... |
443,557 | 819,382 | 109,906 | 5 | Tiptoes Around an Interesting Question . | The movie itself isn't very good . It moves slowly and is badly photographed . The lighting makes too much use of neon blue , a popular fad around the time this appeared . The acting is okay , though , except for Ice Cube , who cannot seem to act . The score is routine . The script has two good things going for it . On... |
443,222 | 819,382 | 46,791 | 5 | The Appearance of Impropriety . | This is a big colorful Hollywood drama and murder mystery . Van Heflin is a wealthy Broadway producer . In his wife's absence ( Gene Tierney ) , he befriends a twenty-year-old girl who is a would-be writer , Peggy Ann Garner . She stands out as refreshingly candid and likable , especially in the midst of all the vacuou... |
442,584 | 819,382 | 107,969 | 5 | Liesurely cross-cultural murder mystery . | There is an ancient Japanese saying , " Always leave the cage door open in case the bird returns . " Another ancient Japanese saying goes , " Tempus fugit . " Man , is this movie dated . When this was written , what the Japanese don't already own , they seem to be buying up . Their technology was light years ahead of o... |
441,797 | 819,382 | 119,361 | 5 | In the Company of Moral Idiots | Who dreamed this thing up ? Somebody who had just come out of a theater having seen " Dangerous Liaisons " or " Valmont " and thought , hey , let's do something similar but make it more " socially relevant " , and without any of the sly wit of the original ? As it is , it's like watching Joan of Ark burn at the stake f... |
441,760 | 819,382 | 42,960 | 5 | Portrait of the Protagonist as Schmuck . | Poor Farley Granger . He's memorable largely because of three pictures he made : " Side Street , " " Strangers on a Train , " and " They Live by Night . " ( In two of them he played opposite Cathy O'Donnell , as he does here . ) The roles were almost the same . Innocent young guy gets swept up in all kinds of murderous... |
443,523 | 819,382 | 162,661 | 6 | Voloptuous and spooky . | To tell the truth , I was a little confused by the plot . Yes , it's true . The story that used to be on every high school reading list lost me here and there . I can't remember the original , but did it really include so much detail about family trees and inheritances and local conspiracies to hide forbidden truths ? ... |
442,863 | 819,382 | 112,864 | 6 | Bang , bang - - then BOOM . | As with any effective action movie , you're glued to the screen even as you goggle at the stupidity of it all . People get shot , sawed in half by wire ropes , blown up , run over by renegade subway trains , electrocuted by helicopters whose rotor blades make a mare's nest of high-tension power cables . I couldn't coun... |
441,724 | 819,382 | 41,841 | 6 | Action exciting , romance requisite , history baloney | This one has all the John Wayne tag lines , the less literate ones , like : " Don't throw your arm out of joint . " " Into each life a little rain must fall . " ( That's from Longfellow but he doesn't know it or he wouldn't have said it . ) " Knock if off . " " Let's not get religion . " " Drift " ( To a hooker . ) " S... |
442,358 | 819,382 | 28,212 | 6 | Never Send a Boy To Do a Man's Job . | Hitchcock was fond of telling a story about the meaning of suspense . If two men are seated at a desk , discussing baseball , and a bomb unexpectedly blows up under the desk - - that's shock . But if the audience KNOWS there is a bomb ticking away under the desk , they squirm in their seats and want to shout out warnin... |
442,209 | 819,382 | 480,249 | 6 | Where is Everybody ? | Never having read Richard Matheson's novel , I can't comment on how closely the movie follows the book . Certainly closer than an earlier transposition , " The Omega Man . " A doctor seeking a cure for cancer winds up with one that kills everyone instead . A few million people are immune , as can be expected in a genet... |
441,892 | 819,382 | 254,455 | 6 | A Keeper Without a Lighthouse | I can't remember seeing many movies that were more beautifully shot than this one . It doesn't hit you over the head like one of David Lean's colossal spectacular stupendous architectiptoptoloftical magnificences but it is quietly effective . Faded when it needs to be , dark and moody when required . It's not just the ... |
442,212 | 819,382 | 66,064 | 6 | Nobody Wins . | Basically the story of a duel of wits between a German submarine captain ( Helmut Griem ) , ranking officer in a Scottish POW camp , and an Irish captain in the British army ( Brian Keith ) who is sent to administer the camp and investigate the reasons for the POWs riotous behavior . It develops that Griem is organizin... |
443,583 | 819,382 | 26,246 | 6 | All This Commotion Over a Nasty Pawnbroker . | What a curious film . Peter Lorre is Roderick Raskolnikov , an impoverished writer of magazine articles in what appears to be 1930s Russia . His whole family is in financial trouble . His sister Antonya is about to marry a pompous blowhard for his money . Lorre can't pay his meager rent . He's already pawned the watch ... |
441,711 | 819,382 | 65,079 | 6 | Culture Conflict in the Mojave . | Conrad Hall's photography turns the harsh , hostile Mojave Desert into the kind of place in which some entrepreneur might build a high-end spa , or a " land developer " might set up a nice , gated community for retirees , with streets that have names like Happy Trail and No Problem Drive and Party Time Cove . Or , come... |
443,112 | 819,382 | 83,678 | 6 | Engaging study of informal norms . . | SPOILERS . The title has a double meaning . Nicholson is an agent of the border patrol who moves from California to El Paso . He and his wife begin hanging with Harvey Keitel and his wife , also a border patrol family . The women are complete airheads . ( I'm trying to keep this summary brief . ) Nicholson and his wife... |
442,749 | 819,382 | 26,266 | 6 | Tough and Tender Minded | On a tour of America , Charles Dickens met Edgar Allan Poe . It couldn't have been much of a conversation . One writer was maybe the most effective speller of psychological nightmares who ever lived , and the other was an advocate of the poor and a fighter against social inequity . The psychologist and the sociologist ... |
442,263 | 819,382 | 118,607 | 6 | Commercial , slow , professional . | The first third of the movie is pretty exciting , loaded with dramatic special effects - - a storm at sea , stroboscopic lightning , butcher with a cutlass . The second act is interesting too and competently done . The 40-some captured Mende are introduced to New England culture , such as it was in 1839 , and Spielberg... |
442,143 | 819,382 | 109,034 | 6 | Captivating Murder Story | This plot-driven story is better than I'd expected it to be . The story is this . An efficient , highly respected cop , Chris Reeves , must cover for his inept younger brother on the same police force . While doing so on one occasion , he is shot by the perp and paralyzed from the waist down . He's retired from the for... |
442,009 | 819,382 | 120,472 | 6 | Stick to the scenario . | There's no reason to have more sympathy for Koresh and the Branch Davidians than for any other sect - - or any less , for that matter . Koresh seems to have done what so many charismatic leaders have done before and after him . He speaks smoothly , he reasons intuitively , he flatters his flock , and somehow or other h... |
442,122 | 819,382 | 56,370 | 6 | Pathography of American Nazi . | It's 1942 . Sidney Poitier is a psychiatrist at a federal prison who takes on Bobby Darin as a patient . Darrin , a racist and a member of the German-American Bund , is in the slams for advocating the overthrow of the government . Darrin , however , has no interest in having his head shrunk . It's just that he can't sl... |
442,820 | 819,382 | 30,675 | 6 | Too Much of a Good Thing | This time around , Sir Percy Blakeney ( Barry K . Barnes ) , aka the Scarlet Pimpernel , has left off rescuing the French nobility from the guillotine , having promised his wife never to return to Paris . But the villainous Robespierre and his henchman are determined to get hold of Blakeney any way they can and lop off... |
441,915 | 819,382 | 39,152 | 6 | Schematic Conversion | In all but two respects this is a typical Republic Studios Western . There is little doubt about who is good and who is bad . No sympathy is wasted on anybody . The story begins with a shoot out and takes Wayne , the gunslinger , mumbingly half-conscious , to the house of some Quaker family , who nurse him back to heal... |
443,381 | 819,382 | 411,705 | 6 | There have been worse . | I have to say that I dozed off a bit during the 9 songs recorded live at a concert because , with one exception , a simple piano solo , it is just not my kind of music anymore . I don't mean that the music is poor , only that I can't tell whether it's any good or not . About half the movie is shot at a concert . The ot... |
443,316 | 819,382 | 78,122 | 6 | Delicate French Sex Comedy | I can't remember the name of those French pastries that are about the size and shape of an irregular softball . They look rich and filling but when you poke them with a fork - - poof . They deflate into insubstantiality . And I can't remember . Je suis desolee . And the Mexicans have a similar dessert dripping with hon... |
441,655 | 819,382 | 118,564 | 6 | Sins of the Fathers . | This is by any measure a superior movie , yet it's hard to form any global judgment on it because there are several ways of looking at it . The story involves a small-town New England police official , Nick Nolte , who is plagued by personal problems . He's about to engage in a custody battle with the wife who has left... |
442,926 | 819,382 | 75,925 | 6 | Profoundly Deep . | I kind of enjoy seeing this movie every few years , for a number of reasons . The first reason is Jacqueline Bisset , She is stunning , all sun tan , big blue eyes that look in slightly different direction , impressively bebosomed , nice legs - - and we are introduced to her while she's scuba diving at Bermuda with her... |
443,019 | 819,382 | 118,548 | 6 | Entertaining Eastwood Thriller . | Eastwood , nobody's fool , seems to alternate between quiet , almost arty films , and commercial thrillers or comedies . This is probably an above-average example of one of his thrillers . The plot - - in brief - - Eastwood is a highly skilled thief and in the process of burglarizing a rich old man's house he witnesses... |
442,485 | 819,382 | 70,510 | 6 | Beguiling Comedy . | Ten-year-old Tatum O'Neal is no Shirley Temple in this tale of a Midwestern miscreant ( Ryan O'Neal , her dad ) who adopts her while scamming bereaved widows into buying his phony , inscribed Bibles . The two O'Neals scrap constantly as they meander from town to town and misadventure to misadventure . Tatum quickly pro... |
441,989 | 819,382 | 407,304 | 6 | Is Newark Worth Saving ? | A few questions . Compared to the original " War of the Worlds , " would you guess the monsters in this modern remake are ( 1 ) smaller than the originals , ( 2 ) about the same size , or ( 3 ) bigger ? How about this ? In the original we never got to see more of the monsters than a single drooping dying spidery hand .... |
442,261 | 819,382 | 252,503 | 6 | Find the Gold in this Picture . | This would be a rather standard heist / double cross movie if it weren't for the fact that the dialog has Mamet's ink spilled all over it . I mean , look at this plot . A tired old gunslinger , I mean thief , wants to get enough money to retire to South America and get a sun tan with his girl friend ( Hackman and Pigeo... |
443,157 | 819,382 | 38,975 | 6 | Effective , spooky , Victorian murder mystery . | Dorothy McGuire plays Helen , a mute maid in the Victorian mansion owned by the ailing , bed-bound Ethel Barrymore . It's never a good time to be mute , but this is a particularly bad period because someone is going around in the nearby town and killing young women with imperfections . The constable comes around to war... |
441,917 | 819,382 | 41,954 | 6 | A Fool for Love | Audrey Totter is splashed all over the ads for this movie , so I naturally worried it would be the story of a woman in jeopardy . You know the kind . Nice rich girl is swept off her feat and marries a dark and handsome man of mystery but he's really a cad who is out for her money and she finds out he's planning to kill... |
442,453 | 819,382 | 116,594 | 6 | Fish or Fowl ? | One of the reasons it's so difficult to evaluate this movie is that it's hard to tell exactly how much of herself Lili Taylor is putting into the role of Valerie Solanas , the author of S . C . U . M . Manifesto and some kind of play called Up Your . I haven't seen much of Taylor's other work , only ' The Haunting , ' ... |
442,306 | 819,382 | 75,865 | 6 | Fugu : Hazardous to Your Health . | Don't get this one mixed up with the episode in which Martin Landau plays twins , one of them a TV chef . This is the one in which Louis Jourdan is the TV chef and restaurant critic who is extorting three high-end restaurateurs . They pay him a quarter of their profits . He prints laudatory reviews . This is known as "... |
443,109 | 819,382 | 106,977 | 6 | The Doctor is Out . | Part of the fun of the original series , lo those many years ago , was watching Doctor Richard Kimble get turned into Doctor Richard Humble . I mean , here he is in the person of David Jansen , and we know he's got a sconce full of medical knowledge and everything , yet he's running from town to town being a gardener o... |
443,566 | 819,382 | 35,105 | 6 | Fast Comedy of Dextrous Sisters . | It's hard to watch this without comparing it to the 1955 musical directed by Richard Quine ( who happens to play Frank in this version ) and starring Janet Leigh , Betty Garret , Bob Fosse , and Tommy Rall . The stories are fundamentally similar - - two cheerful and ambitious sisters from Columbus , Ohio , the level-he... |
442,930 | 819,382 | 65,207 | 6 | The Guns of Germany . | The two Allied impostors , Richard ( " I've been through hell " ) Burton , and Ciint ( " My Mule Don't Like You Laughin ' at Him " ) Eastwood , have infiltrated a German fortress high atop a craggy mountain , accessible only by cable car . Their mission : discover the identity of a cabal of Nazi spies operating out of ... |
441,863 | 819,382 | 340,376 | 6 | An Old Man in a Dry Month . | Michael Caine plays a pathetic wretch who , 40 years ago , participated in the murder of seven Jews in France . Certain rogue elements within the Catholic Church have been hiding him , shuffling him from place to place , and another organization has been sending him money from time to time . I'm a little confused about... |
443,457 | 819,382 | 899,221 | 6 | Decent history lesson . | This brand new documentary on The History Channel isn't bad at all , though it seems to carry with it a certain limited view of its own demographics . It's historically accurate , at least as far as I can tell , and has reasonably good production values . When I say that it has a limited view of its demographics , what... |
441,947 | 819,382 | 118,715 | 6 | Relaxed spoof with charm . | Something about an aging hippie called " The Dude " who is hired to find a woman who's kidnapping was faked and who was supposed to be ransomed with fake money , but none of that has anything to do with the film , which makes fun of just about everything , fake or genuine . Among the targets of the Coen brothers ' jibe... |
442,350 | 819,382 | 95,599 | 6 | Labyrinthine plot , slightly smutty . | Money , mayhem , and sex . How can you go wrong ? Meg Tilly , unglamorized , is a naive teen-aged graduate of a Catholic school . She makes her other-worldly way back to her REALLY dysfunctional , rambling mansion in Easthampton , where her villainous stepfather ( John Glover , hammy but great ! ) is staggering around ... |
442,701 | 819,382 | 281,820 | 6 | Disjointed , atmospheric Monaco caper flick . | Never having seen the original " Bob le Flambeur " I can't compare it to this remake . On its own , this one isn't bad as remakes go . It's juiced up , confusing , and noisy but it's engaging too . The first thing one notices is that Nick Nolte as Bob is pretty good . He's older now and a little puffy . His voice is a ... |
443,582 | 819,382 | 39,029 | 6 | Tortuous Story of Three Miscreants . | Geraldine Fitzgerald recruits two strangers - - Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet - - from the foggy streets of Victorian London and asks them to her flat . She asks them to chip in for a sweepstakes ticket and sign a document that they are equal contributors and none will sell his third of the payoff to anyone else .... |
442,376 | 819,382 | 347,884 | 6 | Slow but atmospheric . | Written and directed by Leslie McCleave , this is a deliberately paced story of ex-lovers united for a trip to Canada's worst toxic pollution sites . The young woman ( Catherine Kellner ) is a low-level bureaucrat whose intention is to photograph the sites with an odd-looking camera that evidently turns toxic objects r... |
442,583 | 819,382 | 734,550 | 6 | A golden age . | This is one of the better episodes of the series , though it's no more than a variation on a common theme of Serling . ( The best example is called something like " A Short Walk to Town , " with Gig Young . ) Here , J . D . Cannon is Serling's alter ego , a business executive constantly being shouted at and told to " P... |
442,681 | 819,382 | 47,630 | 6 | Lively Adventure . | There isn't too much of Homer left in this comic book adventure detailing the voyage of Ulysses ( Kirk Douglas ) from the shores of Troy to his home in Ithaca . It's all pretty much boiled down . Gone are such distractions as Scylla and Charybdis and the naughty Calypso . But we still have an extended stay with Circe t... |
441,703 | 819,382 | 186,566 | 6 | You're Only as Old as You Are . | Generally entertaining tale of aging astronauts in space . It seems this obsolete Soviet satellite is decaying in its orbit and may crash into earth somewhere and a team is needed to stabilize it . The problem is that the engineering is so obsolete that nobody knows exactly how to do it except the people who designed i... |
441,654 | 819,382 | 32,728 | 6 | Dramatic and Episodic Sea Tale . | Maybe one of the reasons this is less successful than most of the other movies John Ford was directing about this time is that the other productions were so darned good . " The Long Voyage Home " isn't without interest but it doesn't measure up to the rest of Ford's work . Based on a couple of Eugene O'Neill's short pl... |
441,974 | 819,382 | 90,037 | 6 | I'll Have the Sturm , Please , With a Little Drang on the Side . | A story of a teen ager edging into maturity . Laura Dern is idiosyncratically beautiful as the 15-year old . She's long legged , deeply tanned , has flowing blond hair that sets off her dark brows and lashes . The problem is that she IS only fifteen . Another year , one way or the other , would be a misjudgment for the... |
442,156 | 819,382 | 43,782 | 6 | The Purloined Will . | Joseph Cotton is Dupin , the hard-drinking literary guy in a black cloak . He becomes acquainted with M . Thevernet ( Louis Calhern ) in New York City in 1848 . Calhern is a sick old man who drinks too much and is being watched night and day by his wife , Barbara Stanwyck , and his butler , Joe DeSantis , both of whom ... |
442,295 | 819,382 | 73,906 | 6 | A celebration of testosterone . | A story of the kidnapping of a young woman ( Candace Bergen ) and her two children by Morrocan brigand Raisuli ( Sean Connery ) and his band of warriors . The episode begins with Bergen having tea in her garden with her elderly British guest . The sudden quiet is broken by Berber horsemen crashing through the lattice w... |
442,283 | 819,382 | 50,468 | 6 | Clash of the Titans - - Tense and Polished . | It covers a lot of territory and , frankly , I got a little lost from time to time but it's still tightly woven , driven by character , and likable . The production design , wardrobe , and makeup are distinctive . None of this grimy , cowboys-on-the-trail , unshaven , spitoon-abusing nonsense . These guys , even the Cl... |
441,788 | 819,382 | 26,205 | 6 | Thrills and romance on the China Sea . | This film has some good things going for it . First , a cast of MGM's finest - - Clark Gable , Jean Harlow , Wallace Beery , Rosalind Russel , Robert Benchley , among others . Gable is the skipper of a somewhat battered passenger liner in Asiatic waters . Harlow is the girl he's been associated with , so to speak , a l... |
443,280 | 819,382 | 52,311 | 6 | On the Border | Charlton Heston , a Mexican-American lawyer , and his new wife , Janet Leigh , get mixed up in a gang murder in a border town . The chief detective is Orson Welles , full of his splendid self , excessively corpulent , and sporting a hawkish putty nose . He eats candy . ( " It's either that or the booze , " he rumbles i... |
443,551 | 819,382 | 45,919 | 6 | If God had meant man to fly . . . . | Ernest K . Gann has an idiosyncratic prose style , precious and precise at the same time . He tends to use a lot of interior monologue and description and he throws in little unexpected tidbits - - " And where , pray tell , is home ? " Reading his work is a little like flying an airplane . Nothing much happens , but wh... |
443,290 | 819,382 | 256,103 | 6 | Speechless Love . | A worthy movie for adults . The plot is a bit like " Last Tango in Paris , " with a man and woman accidentally meeting , then showing up one afternoon a week for some rabid sex , neither telling the other anything about themselves . The guy ( Mark Rylance ) decides to follow the woman ( Kerry Fox ) , discovers she's ma... |
442,574 | 819,382 | 479,977 | 6 | Poirot at Work . | Considerable fun can be had at the expense of the big super-duper Hollywood productions of Agatha Christie's Poirot stories from the 1970s . COLOSSAL STUPENDOUS STAR-STUDDED CAST ! and all that . Yet , after watching a few of these very well-done British TV episodes , I'm beginning to wonder if it doesn't help to see F... |
442,630 | 819,382 | 219,699 | 6 | Let us now praise Blanchett . | A widow with ESP ( Cate Blanchett ) lives with her son in a small Southern town , helping people by trying to " read " their futures and living on donations . There are folks who don't like that kind of devlish stuff ' round here . Katie disappears . Blanchett , who is one of those psychics who cannot control their " v... |
443,086 | 819,382 | 122,690 | 6 | Successful , Machine-Processed Action Movie . | I'm going to give it a 6 partly because it was shot in Paris , Nice , and Arles . It gives you a tourist's eye view of France in the winter , including a chilly , overcast Riviera and Van Gogh's Yellow House , morphed into what looks like an overpriced café . Other than that , this is an action movie stripped down to t... |
442,067 | 819,382 | 37,166 | 6 | Morts pour le pays . | An above average , if inexpensive , Warner Brothers war-time movie about the Free French in England . Five French convicts manage to escape from Devil's Island with the help of Grandpere , a patriotic ex-convict who has managed to save enough money to buy the escapees a canoe . He makes them promise that when they esca... |
443,453 | 819,382 | 59,017 | 6 | Effective comic Western . | This movie was both original and successful on its release . You can easily tell it made money because of the number of sequels it spawned - - " Support Your Local Sheriff , " " Waterhole Number 3 , " - - and the many others it undoubtedly influenced . There had been comic Westerns before , but few major productions ev... |
443,130 | 819,382 | 74,085 | 6 | Too Little , Too Late . | Five members of Black September take a dozen or so Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics in 1972 , killing two others . Led by Franco Nero , they demand the release of more than two hundred Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails . Israel refuses to agree and the German authorities ( William Holden as Schreibe... |
442,972 | 819,382 | 83,908 | 6 | Getting a bit fagged out . | One of the better Christie adaptations . Enjoyable but still getting noticeably tired . The performances are fine . Ustinov's Hercule Poirot is the equal of both David Suchet and Albert Finney , fine Poirots in their own right . Roddy MacDowell plays a snoopy gay journalist to just the right level - - see him perching ... |
442,908 | 819,382 | 91,554 | 6 | See LA and Die . | Jane Fonda is Viveca , a faded actress and major drunk of this or any other generation , who wakes up in bed with a strange man next to her who happens to have a knife sticking out of his chest . She draws a blank . Did she kill him or not ? She cleans the guy's apartment of any trace of herself before leaving and gets... |
441,781 | 819,382 | 483,726 | 6 | Williams is funny but movie devolves . | Robin Williams , a TV satirist , runs for president as a joke and because of a glitch in the electronic voting machines , he wins . Everyone is stunned . Williams ' manager , Christopher Walken is stunned , partly because the percentage he will take of Williams ' presidential salary is so much smaller than what he was ... |
443,091 | 819,382 | 89,716 | 6 | There is no such thing as being TOO paranoid . | The film traces the military and romantic careers of Colonel Alfred Redl from his humble beginnings , through a military academy , into the Austro-Hungarian army , to the guileful environment of high political intrigue , to his ultimate altruistic suicide in 1913 . It's supposedly based on a true story but since so lit... |
442,647 | 819,382 | 45,920 | 6 | More Undocumented Aliens . | Does every SF movie made in the 1950s have to be an analog of McCarthyism ? This is nothing more than a good SF movie made with a certain elan by Jack Arnold on a low budget . The desert , alas , is supposed to be in Arizona , which means that it should be Sonoran , with saguaro cacti . Instead it is clearly Mohave des... |
443,269 | 819,382 | 45,925 | 6 | Well-done B Western drama . | I saw this as a kid and was impressed by it . Seeing it for only the second time , six-hundred and twelve months later , it STILL seems pretty good . Ordinarily , one judges a film chiefly by the story , direction , and acting , but this is different because so much of whatever qualities it has comes from the talents o... |
443,250 | 819,382 | 43,687 | 6 | Sad , Involving Story of Sports Hero . | The movie itself isn't outstanding in any way . Michael Curtiz , the director , keeps the bodies in motion and wastes no time on pretentious touches . Burt Lancaster is solid without rising above the rather banal script , in which Jim Thorpe , a Sac and Fox Indian , starts out an impoverished kid on the reservation , r... |
442,772 | 819,382 | 91,605 | 6 | The Game is Afoot | An unusual flick , divided into two parts , the first part taking up most of the screen time and being the more involving . William of Baskerville - - a name to conjure with - - and his sidekick Adzo arrive at a medieval monastery run by Dominican monks , rather like Monte Cassino . The Dominicans were never known for ... |
442,700 | 819,382 | 105,414 | 6 | The Evil Twin | If I didn't know this was written by a man I'd swear it was written by a woman because it's got the female interactional style down pat . Don't blame me for this observation . It's straight out of Deborah Tannen , your major feminist . We have a friendship between two women , one very plain ( Jennifer Jason Lee ) with ... |
441,661 | 819,382 | 41,487 | 6 | Dysfunctional Family . | Pretty interesting story , and adult too . Robinson is Pa Minetti , an Italian immigrant , formerly a penurious barber , now the prosperous president of his own bank . He has three older sons - - Luther Adler , Valentine , and Zimbalist . And he favors his youngest son , Max ( Richard Conte ) , who is a lawyer and has ... |
442,836 | 819,382 | 97,441 | 6 | Overall fine ; in detail flawed . | There were complaints that Mathew Broderick was too short and unimposing to play Robert Gould Shaw , the Colonel who led the 54th Massachussetts into battle and dismemberment . I don't think I agree . Why should a courageous and even heroic man be made to look like Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses ? Weren't there ever... |
442,151 | 819,382 | 68,400 | 6 | Good first-season Colombo | This one has Roddy MacDowell as the chief villain , a conniving and brilliant member of a family that owns some kind of gigantic chemical plant , only two victims away from the presidency . Good support too , from James Gregory ( huffing and puffing ) , Anne Francis , Ida Lupino , and William Windom . In order to elimi... |
442,907 | 819,382 | 68,401 | 6 | Who's Double Crossing Whom Around Here ? | Ray Milland is the orchid-fancying heavy in this story of a faked kidnapping . He has a lot of chutzpah , bluffing the police , planting false leads , all driven by his pitiless , gonadal desire to get his hands on the trust fund of the nephew whom he double crosses and murders . Raymond Gland , the orchideous monster ... |
441,825 | 819,382 | 66,473 | 6 | Think Before You Attack . | There aren't any big stars in this movie but many fine and reliable actors . It's competently directed . A monumental amount of money was spent on it . It's as historically accurate as the limits of commercial film making allowed . It's about an event of great magnitude . The director considers it one of his best films... |
442,079 | 819,382 | 120,660 | 6 | Hold on to your hats , boys and girls ! | The movie falls completely apart at the end , but before the last ten minutes we have a rootin ' , tootin ' action movie full of technological wizards , chases , shootouts , a hero climbing the face of a hotel in his underwear , a couple of murders , voyeurism , the loner hero's pet cat , and two mismatched protagonist... |
441,772 | 819,382 | 68,396 | 6 | Is this London that I see before me ? | A pretty good entry in the early series , this episode takes Columbo to London where he more or less guides a dilatory Scotland Yard through a maze of clues to the solution of a murder . The murder has to do with the social world of British theater and the culprits are a pair of Shakespearean actors ( Richard Basehart ... |
442,931 | 819,382 | 68,399 | 6 | Susan Clark , Fratricide . | Susan Clark is this rich , mousy woman who is dominated by her brother , Richard Anderson . They dwell in this mansion in which Anderson runs everything . He also runs the family's advertising corporation which is making megabucks . Clark is seeing a lawyer who serves on the Board of Directors , Leslie Nielsen , younge... |
442,982 | 819,382 | 47,956 | 6 | Undemanding Biography | I find it kind of enjoyable in a smooth , Hollywood kind of way . Billy Mitchell did go through the various experiences we see on screen , only not in the particular details shown . The deck is stacked in favor of Gary Cooper as the hero , Billy Mitchell . I read a reasonably balanced biography of Mitchell some years a... |
442,800 | 819,382 | 41,724 | 6 | Hollywood's Foreign Legion vs . the Ay-rabs . | I tried to count the number of times George Raft , Cavalry Captain in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco , in the early years of the 20th century , blinked , but I didn't see any blinks at all . I wouldn't advance the proposition that George Raft never blinks in this movie . That's not it at all . It's just that I ne... |
443,436 | 819,382 | 61,075 | 6 | Dame Agatha , Smooth as Silk . | This was a super novel . I don't mean a work of art , I mean super in the sense that a crossword puzzle is superior . How did she work it out ? What went on in that mind of hers ? Why did she disappear so abruptly and where did she go during her absence ? This is her most popular story , judging from the number of movi... |
443,467 | 819,382 | 39,192 | 6 | One Nunnery You Should Not Get Thee To . | An object lesson in how to make the most out of some thin material . The photography by Jack Cardiff is superb and so are the sets by Alfred Junge . What locations ! The rugged Himalayas , a deserted monastery that a handful of proper English women is determined to turn into a nunnery , saw-toothed mountain tops , gian... |
443,514 | 819,382 | 72,251 | 6 | Enjoyable | The print I always manage to catch is tinted a gloomy blue but that's okay . The movie is worth watching anyway . The story line is familiar enough that I won't bother going over it much . The notion that the thieves should name themselves after colors - - Mr . Brown , Mr . Green - - was adopted by Tarantino for " Rese... |
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