The 1966 gangster film Tokyo Drifter is an admitted influence on Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1, and it is good to be precise about that phrasing, since once you’ve admitted that something is an influence, you can no longer be accused of flat-out plagiarism. For the influence is, shall we say, not all that […]

Michael Mann’s first theatrical feature (in the United States, anyhow), Thief, has something of a reputation for being the Mann film that Mann fanciers haven’t quite gotten around to seeing even though they know that they ought to, because it’s supposed to be really good. Which, if it isn’t true that it’s really good, that’s […]

“THE RETURN OF TRUE HORROR” shrieks the trailer for Drag Me to Hell, and I’m almost willing to agree without reservation. The film finds Sam Raimi in a very rare mood indeed, making a PG-13 ghost story that doesn’t seem to understand the limitations that a PG-13 implies, going right ahead and presenting us with […]

In the spring of 1979, a 36-year-old nobody got a chance to make a TV movie. I take that back, not a nobody: he’d written a few episodes of some different cop shows, and directed an episode of the Angie Dickinson series Police Woman, and lest we forget, back in the ’70s there was no […]

I’ll forgive you if you haven’t heard of director King Vidor, even though he’s one of the greatest American filmmakers of the ’20s and ’30s – some of his best work remains unavailable on DVD, including today’s subject, and his best-known work is the Kansas scenes from The Wizard of Oz, a film for which […]