"James Mason is pretty flat in the role…" The author lost most of his credibility with this reader with that line. Mason's Humbert's growing sense of paranoia, panic, and anguish is quite palpable, particularly during the scene on the roadside when he notices he's being followed.

Then prepare to have your mind blown: google "Kuleshov Effect."

This comic is like the flip side of the Night Gallery episode "The Flip Side of Satan."

I recall one critic characterized his relationship with Pike as that of a spouse. But if anybody were unclear about that, obviously there's the scene of him calling out Pike's name in anguish when he sees Pike get shot. Of course, the other coded gay relationship in the movie is between two of the thugs working with…

Thornton's motivation for catching Bishop is that the owner of the railroad sprang him from prison to find Bishop, and will send him back if he fails. The deleted scenes - how Thorton got caught and Bishop got away, Thorton suffering abuse in prison - do add more texture to the relationship between the two characters,…

Who knows how accurate this is, but I remember reading a story about this film back when they did the 30th anniversary release back in '99, and it mentioning how they basically had to document that they hadn't added any previously unseen footage for the re-release, because the MPAA wanted to give it an NC-17 rating.

This is nothing new. They've had stories that continued on and on without ultimate resolution since practically the dawn of cinema. They were called "serials." Viewers would be left hanging in suspense at the end of an installment - heroine tied up on the railroad tracks, hero tied to a chair in an abandoned mine with…

Well, that's like when General Motors would try and turn around one of their struggling brands. They'd start with a few good ideas, but they'd all get filtered through various committees and corporate fiefdoms, and ultimately all they'd come up with is a slightly redesigned badge or something.

Since we're going to talk about the French New Wave and its effect on "New Hollywood," it's worth pointing out that most of the Trumbo films being spotlighted this week are Film Noir, which were essentially the el-cheapo, 'straight to streaming" films of their day. Because these films were thought of as B-filler on…

"Over the course of He Ran All The Way’s taut, tense 77 minutes…" Astonishing, compared to our era where every new Hollywood feature film seems to clock in at 130+ minutes.

Reminds me of the old SNL sketch where Bill Clinton reviewed "An American President," and kept gushing about the "dead wife" plot point, and how the President is "free to enjoy the trappings of the office" without her.

I don't know about Out of Sight, but you could argue that Michael Clayton and Gravity, while very good pictures, are a bit over-hyped. In Gravity's case, nowhere near as over-hyped as Interstellar, but I'm not sure we'll be talking about those movies 15+ years on, like Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

I kind of see it too. On the one hand, they are unquestionably nostalgic for aspects of bygone Americana. Particularly a sort of stoic, masculine, mostly white dominated culture. On the other hand, they tend to poke fun at it and regard it with ironic detachment. But they never ultimately condemn it.

Correction: Another subversive Hollywood movie about Hollywood.

"There are other movies seen in various stages of production on the Capitol lot, none completely convincing as period pastiche…" This relates to what is sort of my main gripe about The Hudsucker Proxy, which is that it was a movie set in 1958, but everything and everybody in it sort of looked, sounded, and acted like…

I'd ask anybody who claims this series is derivative of the American version to withhold judgment until you've seen the season one finale, "Glorious Circular Rotating Mechanism for the Projection of Photographic Images of Social, Economic, and Scientific Progress in the Socialist Workers' State," wherein the main…

Thanks - I was looking for the exact quote online but couldn't find it.

In the words of Pete Campbell describing Exodus, "the whole thing sounds pretty red to me."

Thanks for this post. It's actually quite interesting to read about some of the source material for these films. Unless the book is by a well-known author, I think most tend to assume they're just from original screenplays. It's easy to forget that Hollywood used to adapt all sort of books for the screen, as opposed…

I like to compare the way the theme music is rendered in the season one intro to the season two version (depicted in this clip). Same music, same basic atmosphere (60's kooky-spooky surf guitar), but the latter version just really kicks it up a notch with the uptempo go-go horn section and the more prominent guitar…