Movieline Online

Those who write off the Blaxsploitation genre as merely a glorification of the uglier urban elements of black culture are only half-right. Films like Willie Dynamite (1974) certainly had a love-hate relationship with their lead characters, glamorizing the pimped-out lifestyle - complete with a purple Lincoln town car, mink coats and a stable of beautiful "bitches." But the film pulls the rug out from under the audience and Willie by staging a cinematic intervention that calls for a surprising cultural shift. Attacking the streets with capitalistic fervor, Willie goes against the pimp council (yeah, apparently they have one of those) and instructs his ladies to work wherever and whenever they'd like. But a do-gooder social worker, Cora, who once worked the streets herself, wreaks havoc with his business, turning his women against him and tipping off the cops to badger him with minor offenses. The cumulative effect gets Willie off balance, eventually questioning the ...

Somewhat tedious by giallo standards, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion splits the difference between the plentiful sex and violence typical of the genre and a more highbrow psychological approach. It's a film that keeps you guessing until the final scene (thanks for Ernesto Gastaldi's script) but feels more like a stretched out version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents ...if 'ol Hitch was allowed to really cut loose. Socialite housewife Minou (Dagmar Lassander) is blackmailed by a stranger (Simon Andreu) who has evidence that will implicate her husband in a murder. Desperate to keep him out of prison, she agrees to sleep with the blackmailer to shut him up. But the nightmare continues when a series of photos are delivered to the house, capturing Minou in several compromising positions. When the police finally get involved, all evidence of the alleged affair - and the blackmailer himself - disappears, putting Minou story, and sanity, in question. Gastaldi'...

While collaborations with director Martin Scorsese helped establish Robert De Niro's onscreen persona, his cinematic career began several years before Mean Streets and Taxi Driver ever hit screens. In fact, his early work with director Brian De Palma reveals an actor almost fully-developed from the very beginning, working with the same level of intensity and charismatic appeal. Simply put: the camera loves him. But in films like Greetings, Hi, Mom and The Wedding Party , De Palma's camera takes a far more scattershot approach than his later Hitchcock-inspired genre work. For all it's improvised, counterculture posturing, Greetings (1968) is the most accessible and interesting of the bunch. Following a trio of draft-age young men through Greenwich Village as they attempt to avoid being sent to Vietnam, the fragmentary plot involves computer dating, the Kennedy conspiracy and - most recognizable to De Palma fans - voyeurism. Jon Rubin (De Niro) proposes a series of ...

Under orders from ABC to include more monsters, but saddled with a significantly smaller budget to create them, the new production team behind season two of The Outer Limits (which wound up totaling 17 episodes) had to do more with less. New showrunner Ben Brady fought back with big ideas, adapting source material from sci-fi writers like Harlan Ellison in an attempt to make a strong literary impression...even if the technical execution wasn't always up to snuff. That describes the second season of the cult sci-fi anthology (which ran from 1963 to 1965) fairly well: a collection of great ideas brought to the screen under challenging circumstances. Ellison's two installments are the obvious highlights ( Soldier and Demon with a Glass Hand ), so ahead of their time that James Cameron settled out of court due to the similarities to The Terminator . But ignoring the rest of the episodes is selling the show short, all of which scratch that peculiar sci-fi itch in a way that no...

There was a time when New York City was dangerous, both in the physical and moral sense. A time when hookers were more common than rich housewives with dogs stuffed in their purses. When Times Square was a place to get cheap thrills, not cheap TVs and discount merchandise. The cinema of the ‘70s captured this very well (perhaps none better than Scorsese’s Taxi Driver ), but William Lustig’s Maniac is a worthy document of NYC’s sordid past, a surprising psychological profile and a down ‘n dirty exploitation movie to boot. Joe Spinell plays serial killer Frank Zito as a tortured soul, driven to murder by the memory of his prostitute mother. The fact that his character evokes sympathy despite the atrocity of his crimes (expertly and gruesomely executed by Tom Savini, who also has a small role) is a testament to both Lustig’s direction and Spinell’s performance. By all rights Maniac should have been simply another Halloween clone (it was certainly advertised as such) but instead...

Despite being the second-highest grossing film of director Robert Altman's illustrious career and stuffed with a who's who of British acting talent, Gosford Park has been almost entirely eclipsed by the BBC show that was initially created as a spin-off of the same: Downton Abbey . But Julian Fellowes' success with his small-screen follow-up should in no way diminish Altman's ensemble who-dun-it, which establishes the ground rules for the upstairs / downstairs class dichotomy with a complexity that frustrates and fascinates in equal measure. As the guests arrive for an overnight shooting party (attendees include Kristin Scott Thomas, Charles Dance, Clive Owen, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Ryan Phillippe and Maggie Smith among others), the stage is set for a muted melodrama between the ruling class and their long-suffering servants. Family patriarch William McCordle (Michael Gambon) is despised by most of his blood relatives and bedding most of the female staff. So...