Movieline Online

The neo-noir cycle of the '90s produced a surprisingly robust collection of films ranging from dead-serious throwbacks ( After Dark, My Sweet , The Grifters ) to gonzo cross-genre experiments ( Mulholland Drive, Dark City ). 1993's Romeo Is Bleeding falls somewhere in the middle, which perhaps explains why this traditional - yet intermittently outré - story of a bad cop sinking even further into the shadowy criminal landscape was buried in a hastily dug cinematic grave. In fact, director Peter Medak's film plays like a Film Noir's Greatest Hits compilation, making sure all the staples are represented (world-weary narration, rain-soaked city streets) and adding some new tracks that amplify things to Tarantino levels of excess. Sgt. Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman) has been providing information for underworld types for years, banking 64K each time and "depositing" it in a hole in his backyard, a windfall his wife (Annabella Sciorra) knows nothing about. But...

Ornella Muti may not have the international fame of a Bond girl, but to a generation of pubescent film geeks her role in 1980's Flash Gordon as the seductive and duplicitous Princess Aura, daughter of Ming the Merciless, is just as iconic as Ursula Andress' bikini entrance in Dr. No . Muti didn't even have to show any skin, she simply slinked her way across the screen with as much sensuality as the PG rating allowed. In a film full of comic book camp and general ridiculousness, she was the most captivatingly "real" thing on the screen. Why am I lavishing so much attention on one actress' supporting role in a corny sci-fi adaptation? Because that will be the easiest port of entry for most people to appreciate Appassionata , a 1974 Italian drama focusing on a broken family unit that threatens to implode when its patriarch has an affair with one of his daughter's school-age friends. Emilio (Gabriele Ferzetti) splits his time between his dental prac...

In many ways, Suture (1993) is a proto-typical Sundance film: a cerebral deconstruction of classic Hollywood noir, too artsy for its own good but too interesting to write off completely. It's a work made by filmmakers who are still learning their craft, either too stubborn or too naive to make the small tweaks that would turn an offbeat "indie" into a more bankable thriller. For a film festival crowd, that's something to crow about. For a general audience, it's nothing but aggravation. Vincent Towers (Michael Harris) is a cold, cruel millionaire's son suspected of killing his father. Clay Arlington (Dennis Haysbert) is the brother he didn't know he had. When Vincent discovers their incredible resemblance, he fakes his own death to escape the murder charge, leaving Clay in the driver's seat when he detonates a remote-control bomb. Alive but disfigured, Clay's surgeons use old pictures and video to reconstruct his face - which is actual...

A holdover from the "porno-chic" trend that began and ended with 1972's Deep Throat , writer/director John Byrum's Inserts (1975) failed to connect with audiences at the time, even though it also rode the wave of Depression-era seventies cinema and starred Richard Dreyfuss hot off the success of Jaws and American Graffiti . Its shock tactics may be a bit on the nose, but the story of a failed director producing stag films to make living winds up eliciting some incredibly courageous performances, particularly from the female cast. Dreyfuss plays the "Boy Wonder," a drunken has-been whose career tanked after the studios' transition to "talkies." His muse is a former starlet (Veronica Cartwright) reduced to screwing on film in exchange for a few hits of heroine from their producer, Big Mac (Bob Hoskins), who drops in one day with Cathy (Jessica Harper), an ingénue who turns out to be anything but. When his actress suffers an accidental ov...

Released the same year Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were paired up in The Mummy , Hammer Films' The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) proved the company could do more than just reboot creaky Universal properties and shock audiences with day-glo gore. In fact, up until the recent BBC productions featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, Cushing's portrayal was considered by many to be the definitive representation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's quirky detective, the one-and-only Sherlock Holmes. And Doyle's quasi-supernatural story fits exceedingly well within Hammer's monster movie pantheon. Kicking off with a typically horrific prologue (one that bears close resemblance to The Curse of the Werewolf filmed two years later), the infamous Sir Hugo Baskerville is attacked and killed by a mysterious unseen beast, passing on a family curse that ensures future generations will meet the same fate. Enter the only surviving heir, Sir Henry Baskerville (Christopher Lee), who h...

If you're looking for one unintended positive side-effect of the proliferation of internet porn, at least we can hang our collective hats on this: all those drive-in T&A double-features of the '70s look almost puritanical by comparison. Roger Corman's Student Nurses launched a whole wave of now-innocuous skin flicks, most of them becoming progressively more single-mindedly titillating, drifting further and further afield from the original's overly earnest soap-opera antics. But leave it to director Jack Hill, whose career is hopelessly intertwined with Corman's, to follow in his mentor's footsteps, turning his own Nurses knock-off into a stealthy critique on female empowerment. That's certainly not what you'd expect with a title like The Swinging Cheerleaders . Rest assured, most of the female cast goes topless at one point or another. But it's rarely staged in a callous or exploitative fashion, hewing much closer to the format...