Movieline Online

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 sacrifi...

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 no...

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. ...

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 a...

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...

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...