Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

There’s probably no such thing as a feature-length movie made prior to maybe 1920 or ’21 that can really be suited for modern tastes, I will resentfully concede, but if we can pretend that there is, I’d like to nominate the third of Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas films, The Murderous Corpse from November, 1913, as being […]

In reviewing the first film in Louis Feuillade’s five-part Fantômas series of 1913 and 1914, Fantômas – In the Shadow of the Guillotine, I rather snottily compared to Iron Man 3 as being “a critic-proof, and essentially quality-proof opportunity for filmgoers to spend time with a character they already knew they loved”. And of course […]

On 9 May, 1913, the most popular pulp fiction character in France made the jump from page to screen, in Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas – In the Shadow of the Guillotine. So the first thing we should stop to observe is that this film was basically the equivalent of Iron Man 3 a century later: a […]

Winning Oscars can do terrible things to a film: on the one hand, it’s probably the safest guarantee that a movie from the ’30s or ’40s will continue to get modern eyeballs on it, but it also invariably raises expectations that, the Oscars being the Oscars, don’t tend to be sufficiently paid off. And so […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/20 – Closing Night World premiere: 15 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival The Artist is wildly inconsequential. I say this not in the spirit of judgment – well, okay, it’s very much a judgment, but it’s not judgmental, and there’s a difference there. It’s a film that has virtually nothing to say […]

Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: the grueling Transformers: Dark of the Moon is not original in any meaningful way, and does not claim to […]

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 […]

Street Angel was Frank Borzage’s 1928 follow-up to his masterful 7th Heaven; but it honestly feels much more like his follow-up to F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise. The earlier films were of course produced concurrently, and while 7th Heaven has some distinct sympathies with Murnau’s style, it’s got nothing on Street Angel, which was produced after Sunrise […]

The five films that Frank Borzage directed after 1925’s Lazybones are either lost or otherwise unavailable, meaning that the modern viewer loses a bit of context for the jump from that film to 7th Heaven in 1927; and what a hell of a jump it was. Lazybones, which you may recall as the established director’s […]

The first film Frank Borzage made for William Fox, more than ten years into a career that would ultimately brush against the half-century mark, was Lazybones, adapted from a moderately successful novel and subsequent stageplay. It’s the story of Steve Tuttle (Buck Jones), the local layabout in a small American town. A man who’d rather […]

Frequently cited as the world’s first science-fiction film by people who apparently regard Georges Méliès as a documentarian (his seminal Voyage dans la lune wasn’t even his own first sci-fi picture), René Clair’s Paris qui dort nevertheless can lay claim to being the longest science-fiction film at the time of its 1924 creation. Unfortunately, I’m […]

Settle in, dear reader, for one of the biggest and splashiest epics that Hollywood ever produced, the story of Judah Ben-Hur, prince of Judea, whose family and fortune were stolen away, who became a galley slave before rescuing a rich Roman and becoming a child of privilege in the wealthiest society in the world, who […]