Movieline Online

Science (and the porn industry) has proven conclusively that visual stimulation is a powerful part of male arousal. And for those with an obsessive nature, sex can be as addictive as any drug. Writer / director Paul Schrader specializes in characters with just those sort of psychological fixations, making him a good match for Auto Focus (2002), the dramatized biography of Bob Crane, star of TV's Hogan's Heroes whose murder seven years after the show wrapped remains unsolved to this day. Schrader's film, however, is more interested in the career-killing spiral of compulsive sexual activity that put Crane on this tragic path in the first place. A successful radio DJ reticent to star in a comedy about the Holocaust, Crane (played with creepy sincerity by Greg Kinnear) is a charming and likable family man who uses his overnight success to seduce every woman he meets, recording his conquests on videotape with the help of his techie wingman (Willem Dafoe). But as word of...

A film doesn't have a responsibility to be timeless . In fact, as an art form, cinema works best as a reflection of the era in which it was made. But sometimes art reveals how little we've actually changed as a culture, for better or worse, as in the case of two new releases from Twilight Time, starting with No Down Payment (1957), an early canary-in-coal mine criticism of America's post-war obsession with capitalism that is still accurate enough to give anyone the shivers - Republican or Democrat! Ensconced in a perfectly landscaped neighborhood full of houses no one can quite afford, a gaggle of upwardly mobile residents are introduced to the newest members of the club: newlyweds David & Jean Martin who are quickly co-opted into a parade of marital problems including alcoholism, overspending, thwarted ambition, overt racism and rape. Sly subverting the old adage, "If you lived here, you'd be home by now!" director Martin Ritt elevates the melo...

Hammer Films may have kickstarted the Euro-horror scene with 1958's Horror of Dracula , but its influence traveled far and wide, eventually circling the globe to inspire a series of Japanese vampire films produced under the Toho banner gathered here as The Bloodthirsty Trilogy . 1970's The Vampire Doll is the flat-out creepiest of the bunch, although the title is a bit of a misnomer. Lifting its major plot twist from Poe's The Fact in the Case of M. Valdemar (and Roger Corman's film adaptation in Tales of Terror ), vampirism never comes into play, but director Michio Yamamoto creates a Gothic-funhouse atmosphere just the same. With reflective cat eyes, long black hair and a goosebump-inducing grin, his "ghost-girl" antagonist is a tragically terrifying figure. The subsequent sequels, Lake of Dracula (1971) and Evil of Dracula (1974) steal more liberally from the Hammer horror model, going so far as to cast a "head vampire" in full Christo...