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One of the biggest blind spots in the parenting toolbox is our inability to judge the true depth of our children’s emotions.  As adults, we think that only grown-up problems matter, when in fact the stakes are just a high for our kids.  Few films capture this flawed logic better than Luigi Comencini’s  Misunderstood  (1966), a melancholy coming-of-age story that digs deep into familial bonds that keep us together…and, just as often, tear us apart. After the death of his estranged wife, John Duncombe is at a loss how to break the news to his two sons. Andrea, the eldest seems to take things in stride, carrying the burden for his younger brother Miles.  But while their father keeps busy with work, the children become more and more desperate for his attention, particularly Andrea who finds himself labeled a “troublemaker” despite every effort to impress.  Instead, it’s Miles, with no memory of his absent mother, who becomes the focus of the family, blissfully ignorant of the tragedies of

You could make a case that genre films are more important for cultural study than any movie that pops up during awards season.  The reason being, while the latter makes every effort to be  timeless , genre films are distinctly  of their time .  Take  Joysticks  (1983) for example, a blatant cash grab that tries to take advantage of two popular trends.  “You got your video games in my sex comedy.  No, you got your sex comedy in my video games!”  Either way, director Greydon Clark had dollars signs in his eyes when he shot this T & A quickie that captured – in truly embarrassing fashion – the early ‘80s generation fascination with boobs, bits and flatulence.  Bailey’s Arcade is the hangout for all of River City’s disaffected youth who bond over games like Gorf, Galaxian and Defender.  But local big wig Joseph Rutter (Joe Don Baker) doesn’t like the affect it’s having on his impressionable daughter so he arranges various acts of sabotage to shut the place down.  After some rude pranks

The adage “When legend becomes fact, print the legend” might have come from a John Ford western, but applies equally well to the exploits of Eliot Ness.  After all, Hollywood would love you to believe the famed prohibition-era crimefighter and his fellow  untouchables  were solely responsible for busting up Al Capone’s criminal organization and making the streets of Chicago safe – not to mention liquor-free!  The truth is more complicated but it makes for a rousing bit of cinematic exaggeration as adapted by film noir veteran Phil Karlson in  The Scarface Mob  (1959), a theatrical presentation of the two-part TV special that continued on for five seasons as  The Untouchables . Brought in to fight fire with fire, Ness (Robert Stack) recruits his team of tough guys on the down low, hoping to dodge the police corruption hampering all previous efforts to enforce the Volstead Act.  And he makes headlines with high-profile raids on breweries and speakeasys that take a bit out of Capone’s pro

Much like the early work of Tim Burton, the films of director Frank Henenlotter exist in their own twisted universe.  Only instead of a gothic suburban fairyland,  Basket Case  (1982) puts down stakes in a seedy Times Square hotel populated by an endearingly colorful collection of hookers, thieves and pimps.  The newest tenant is Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck), a naive upstate import whose most defining characteristic is the large wicker basket he carries under his arm.  What's in the basket?  Why, his separated Siamese twin, Belial, who looks more like a stumpy octopus, on a mission of revenge against the doctors who performed their illegal operation and "broke up the band," so to speak. Inheriting the "Midnight Movie" mantle from  Rocky Horror  (it had a two year run at one famous NYC theater),  Basket Case  wormed its way into the horror genre like a venereal disease.  But Henenlotter's film has a DIY aesthetic that's charming even when it's

Historical period pieces take advantage of everything cinema has to offer: thousands of extras, elaborate costumes, detailed sets and a carefully orchestrated visual palette all in an effort to convince the audience that what they’re seeing is  real …when, of course, all that artistry means it’s anything but.  Based on the legend of one of China’s “Four Great Beauties,”  Hsi Shih: Beauty of Beauties  (1965) is an ambitious response to western epics like  Cleopatra  (released just two years earlier), sending its heroine into the lion’s den to seduce and undermine King Fucha and destroy the barbarous Wu Kingdom from within. Part of a delegation of women sent to appease Fucha’s insatiable appetites, Hsi Shih has actually been trained to whisper into the ears of the enemy and foment a feud with the senior advisor.  Quick on her feet and easy on the eyes, His Shih does her job so well that even fellow countrymen begin to question her loyalty.  But when the time comes for action, she’s the c

Henry Fonda was the most unlikely of tough guys.  With a slight build and soft features, his look was more appropriate for a clumsy romantic suitor or folksy vagabond, both of which he played quite well.  But when his eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched, Fonda could scare the living bejesus out of just about anyone!  So, his career as a western icon flourished along with his everyman roles and, finally, in  The Tin Star  (1957) both aspects of his onscreen personality get to shake hands. Former sheriff turned bounty hunter, Morgan Hickman (Fonda) ambles into town just as the  current  sheriff, Ben Owens (Anthony Perkins), a wet-behind-the-ears temp, is facing his greatest challenge.  The biggest bully in the county is gunning for the job…and isn’t afraid to use his  own  guns to secure the position.  After some convincing, Morgan agrees to take the young lawman under his wing, hoping to show him the ropes before he winds up six feet under.   Director Anthony Mann, hot off a string of ed

My favorite directors have always been showoffs:  Hitchcock, DePalma, Spielberg (when he’s feeling frisky) and gonzo auteurs like Sam Raimi.  There’s just something about their cinematic ambition, constantly reminding the audience that, yes, there actually  is  someone behind the camera calling the shots.  And that directorial discontent shines through even in the early days of the medium, such as Paul Leni’s 1927 adaptation of  The Cat and the Canary .  While the rest of the industry was still learning the basics of visual language, Leni fills his frame with tracking shots, POVs and dramatic lighting that set the standard for every spook show to come!  Gathered for the reading of the last will and testament of eccentric recluse Cyrus West,  the potential heirs meet up in his decrepit mansion to discover who will inherit the estate and family jewels.  Predictably there is some petty jealousy when young Annabelle West is named the sole beneficiary…that is, if she can be proved sane afte

The post-modern gangsters pioneered in Quentin Tarantino’s  Pulp Fiction  didn’t take long to spread to every corner of the cinema landscape.  Suddenly pop-culture references became just as important as shoot-outs and characters were swimming in quirky idiosyncrasies.  Even low-budget auteurs like director Albert Pyun ( Cyborg, The Sword and the Sorcerer ) jumped in headfirst, dragging meat-and-potatoes action stars like Christopher Lambert along for the ride.   In  Mean Guns  (1997), Lambert stars as Lou, one of a hundred-or-so assassins hired by the Syndicate, all of whom are invited to a secret meeting led by Vincent Moon (Ice-T).  In the spirit of competition, Moon offers up 10 million dollars to the three survivors of what turns out to be a  Battle Royale -style death match.  Lou teams up with Marcus, Dee and Cam – an innocent bystander – in a group effort to shoot their way to the top of the leaderboard.   Set against an ironically peppy mambo music score, Pyun delights in lettin

Before streaming began slopping out content to horror fans like pigs at a trough, the  After Dark Horrorfest  was a cool way to provide obscure and international genre efforts some theatrical exposure, quickly followed by a premiere on the burgeoning DVD platform.  There were more than a few gems in there, including  Frontier(s) and  Lake Mungo .  And director Nacho Cerda’s  The Abandoned  (2006) probably sneaks into the top ten; a long dark night story set in the Russian backcountry where two siblings attempt to get uncover their family history…which, as they discover, probably should have stayed buried. After inheriting the property, Marie discovers her birthplace is an isolated, spooky dump that provides more questions than answers.  But she  does  discover a twin brother, Nikolai (Karel Roden), who also experiences lingering doubts about his identity.  Confronted by zombie-like doppelgangers and jumbled recollections of their parent’s death, the duo struggles to make sense of the p

In the words of reviewer Glenn Erickson, better known as  cinesavant ,  “Life is too short to watch any more Jess Franco movies!”  Alternately hailed as a misunderstood genius or a barely proficient hack, few directors have had more of their work  rediscovered  during the DVD / Blu-ray era than Franco, a Spanish jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none with over 200 films to his credit (that we  know  about)!  Most of his work slummed in the sexploitation arena, where skin was essential, a coherent story was optional and focus on pretty much every shot was questionable.  But Franco could work at a competent level from time to time, mostly when partnered with notorious producer Harry Alan Towers, who convinced former Hammer star Christopher Lee to appear in several sleazy productions, among them 1970’s  Night of the Blood Monster .  As King James most merciless lawgiver, Judge Jeffreys (Lee) revels in the torture and mutilation of his primarily female victims.  So, when the sister of a woman

There are two schools of thought on sequels:  employ the  “same but different” approach or try something completely unexpected.  The Inspector Wears Skirts 2  (1989) certainly isn’t out to reinvent the wheel.  With only minor tweaks to the battle-of-the-sexes scenario established in the first film, this Jackie Chan produced follow-up repurposes just about every plot point.   Which I guess makes the unspoken third rule of sequels: “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Still in training for their elite women-only commando unit, this year’s class is joined by four new recruits who need to earn their stripes.  Their male counterparts are as misogynistic as ever, taking every opportunity to prove their physical superiority.  But the girls aren’t immune from some in-fighting themselves, whether it’s over skills in the field…or skills in the bedroom.  But teamwork is essential when a terrorist organization kidnaps their instructor, forcing a jungle showdown to settle the score once and for all.  

Italy wasn’t the only film industry that enjoyed blending genres.  Japan had a rich tradition of  jidaigeki  and  chambara  – or sword fighting films – set against the political chaos of the medieval and early modern era.  Kurosawa’s work might be the most well-known internationally, but as pop culture shifted in the late ‘60s, so did the studios’ approach.   Killer’s Mission ,  The Fort of Death  and  Eight Men to Kill , now recognized collectively as  The Bounty Hunter Trilogy , cobbled together spy film and spaghetti western trends to create a samurai anti-hero, Shikoro Ichibei, whose moral compass often took priority over his compensation package. Killer’s Mission  (1969) has the most traditional plot of the bunch as Ichibei is hired by the shogunate to prevent an ambitious clan from buying a shipload of weapons from a Dutch trading vessel.  This straightforward narrative from director Shigehiro Ozawa ( The Street Fighter)  is embellished with a 007-inspired music score and inventi

The west coast always struggled to create a creepy atmosphere on screen.  All that southern California sunshine just doesn’t lend itself to ghostly apparitions or gothic castles.  But  Tormented  (1960) gives it a good try, staging its opening scene in an abandoned lighthouse where blackmail turns into murder - and one cover up leads to another.  Director Bert I. Gordon, better known for his giant-sized - but low-budget - monster movies, works well at this level, turning in a film that delivers small scares but perhaps his most  professional finished product. Tom Stewart (played by genre regular Richard Carlson) is a fairly successful jazz pianist whose impending marriage to Meg Hubbard (Susan Gordon) will put him in an entirely new tax bracket.  Trouble is his old flame, Vi (Juli Reding), isn’t taking this lying down.  After  allowing  her to fall to her death in the opening scene, Tom is haunted by disembodied visions of his ex-lover who refuses to go quietly into the afterlife.  And

Japanese horror (or  J-Horror  for short) came along just in the nick of time.  By 2002, franchise icons like Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers were barely pulling in an audience and one-shot stabs in the dark like  Ghost Ship  and  Feardotcom were uninspired attempts at creating stand-alone scares.  Meanwhile, in the land of the rising sun, the horror genre was giving birth to new generation of angry spirits that harkened back to a less gratuitous - but no less grotesque - menagerie of monsters.  Director Hideo Nakata launched the J-Horror craze with 1998's  Ringu , remade as  The Ring  in 2002 by Gore Verbinski. By that time, Nakata had already made a sequel himself and was pushing things in even more interesting directions with  Dark Water , a psychological drama with a supernatural edge.  While the selling point here (and in the 2005 remake starring Jennifer Connelly) remained creepy ghost girls and an unrelenting sense of doom, the film's structure swings toward a more matur

John Wayne was an actor who knew his limitations.  He rarely ventured outside the western or war genres and when he  did  – like in John Ford’s  The Quiet Man  – it was with the safety net of a director accustomed to his skill set.  But despite a career bereft of any particular standout performance, Wayne could deliver a line of dialogue as good as anyone in the business.  His final film,  The Shootist  (1976), serves them up on a silver platter, providing a “farewell tour” of tired gunslinger clichés that the old pro knocks out of the park one after the other. Looking for nothing more a quiet place to die after receiving a cancer diagnosis, infamous gunfighter J.B. Brooks (Wayne) takes a room in the boarding house of Bond Rogers (Lauren Bacall) and her starstruck son, Gillom (Ron Howard).  But a legend like Brooks attracts the wrong sort of attention, specifically young pistoleros out to make a name for themselves  or  old enemies with even older grudges.  Brooks decides to go down fi

Just as new generations rediscover the music  Pink Floyd  and the  Grateful Dead , filmmakers are also partial to dusting off inspirations that have been on the shelf for a while.  The fallout from Tarantino’s first two films – Reservoir Dogs  and  Pulp Fiction  – lasted well into the early aughts until passing the baton to directors like Guy Ritchie who added their own up-tempo style.  With  Punto Roj0  (2021), Argentinian director Nic Loreti brings things full circle with a non-linear noir-influenced plot that hits like Uma Thurman snorting a faceful of cocaine.  “ I said goddamn!”   The movie begins with Diego (Demián Salomón), a thug with an encyclopedic knowledge of soccer history, killing time in his car by answering questions on a radio call-in quiz show. Now and then he stops to check on the passenger bound and gagged in his trunk: Nesquick, a low-level middleman who (as we discover in flashback) has screwed up not one but  two  jobs he intended to pull on the same day.  It’s a

Not every movie should be an easy pill to swallow.  Art, by its very nature, should challenge ones’ view of the world every once in a while.  To quote Ingmar Bergman’s three commandments: “Thou shalt be entertaining at all times…thou shalt obey thy artistic consciousness at all times…and thou shalt make each film as if it is thy last.”  And even if many of Bergman’s films were dismissed as self-indulgent, he always made an effort to meet the audience in the middle.  As does  Allonsanfàn  (1974), Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s artfully composed diatribe against personal and political hypocrisy in the modern world…set against the backdrop of Italian unification in 1861.  A dedicated member of the Sublime Brothers, a group of Italian revolutionaries, Fulvio (Marcello Mastroianni) is released from prison in the hope that he will lead authorities to his fellow freedom fighters.  But Fulvio has soured on a life of personal sacrifice, instead leading his friends into a trap then making off with

Upon release of  The Exorcist  in 1973, televangelist Billy Graham warned that there was evil “ in the fabric of the film itself.”    Using cinematic techniques to instill that kind of primordial fear is a rare accomplishment.  What’s even more rare?  Producing the very  opposite  effect on an audience: pure unadulterated joy.  A few Hollywood musicals make the cut, perhaps  Raising Arizona ,  Amelie  and an animated movie or two.  And now we can add the very unexpected  Black Tight Killers  (1966) to the list, a swinging Japanese spy thriller that so campy, colorful and uninhibited one can’t help but smile from the first frame to the last. Returning from assignment as a combat photographer in Vietnam, Hondo (Akira Kobayashi) arranges a date with an attractive stewardess, Yuriko, who is promptly kidnapped by a gang of female ninjas in matching skin tight outfits.  But they’re not the  only  ones after his girl!  Yuriko is passed around between multiple captors each trying to locate her

William Shatner, for all his ego and arrogance, always seemed comfortable being the butt of a joke.  His career outside of the  Star Trek  franchise was a bumpy road of corny TV shows and enjoyable B-movie dreck.  But he never delivered anything less than 100% “Shatner!”  Like 1974’s  Impulse , a regional drive-in quickie directed by William Grefé ( Stanley, Mako: Jaws of Death ) that casts the once and future Captain Kirk as a psychologically troubled con man whose childhood trauma leads to a string of murdered women.  After dumping the body of his last victim in a Florida canal, Matt Stone (Shatner) is on the prowl for another financial windfall, this time using a phony investment scam to entice Ann (Jennifer Bishop) into a romantic relationship.  But when Ann’s daughter, Tina, is witness to the murder of his business associate (Harold “Chop Top” Sakata), Matt has to clean up his tracks and speed up his escape plan.  That includes silencing Tina…and whoever else gets in his way.   Ta

At the risk of sounding like a senior citizen, I lost interest in car chase movies once the vehicles themselves stopped following the rules of physics.  Although I'm sure there are a few stunt drivers still involved the the Fast & Furious  franchise, they're definitely taking a backseat to visual effects artists who probably never got behind the wheel of anything more intimidating than a tricked-out Tesla.  John Frankenheimer's Ronin  might have been the last gasp of real pedal-to-the-metal filmmaking before CGI took over.  But nothing compares to the vehicular choreography of the 1970s, where an out-of-context 20-minute chase scene like the one in Fear is the Key  (1972) slides into an under-the-radar thriller and takes your breath away. Kicking up some dust in a quiet Louisiana town, drifter John Talbot (Barry Newman) absconds with a hostage (Suzy Kendall) during his trial and leads the local authorities on a wild pursuit.  His escape lands him at the mercy of an oil

More than any other form of art, movies excel at making the viewer uncomfortable.  Perhaps it’s the voyeuristic nature of the medium itself, intruding on personal tragedies with that unflinching cinematic lens.  Ingmar Bergman made a  career  of putting the viewer through emotional hell and existential horror…yet kept them coming back for more.  Kohei Oguri’s  The Sting of Death  (1990) is a spiritual successor to Bergman’s masochistic tendencies in many ways; a painful slice-of-life focused on the marital crisis between two people desperate for something to live for…or something to die for. Upon discovering her husband’s infidelity, Miho (Keiko Matsuzaka) takes great pleasure in emotionally abusing Toshio (Ittoku Kishibe) with constant reminders of his moral failure. Her passive-aggressive behavior turns their family unit into an ongoing battleground, where every happy moment is balanced by unexpected cruelty.  Toshio attempts to make amends but finds himself drawn into this unstable

Much of the Italian back-catalog these days is relegated to  exploitation  or  art  with very little wiggle room in either direction.  But the films of Damiano Damiani exist comfortably between both, providing a bit of populist escapism with a dash of local flavor.  More comfortable working in a polished American-style than his Italian contemporaries, Damiani’s 1977 spy thriller  Goodbye & Amen  is a perfect example of his brand of upscale filmmaking. When his latest coup attempt is threatened by a hostage situation involving one of his own operatives, CIA agent John Dannahay (Tony Musante) goes into crisis mode, inserting himself into the negotiations with Italian authorities to try and salvage the job.  But the players aren’t all under his control, including the hostages themselves: a beautiful aristocrat (Claudia Cardinale) having a clandestine affair with a bubble-headed actor.  Meanwhile, the gunman behind it all keeps his motivations under wraps, threatening to ruin the lives