by Dale Dalenberg | Oct 13, 2019 | 100 Years Ago, Reviews
The 1920 publicity photo of De Mille that graces the cover of this otherwise unadorned DVD release of Male and Female shows the director as a confident young man in his late 30’s, already one of the legends who created Hollywood (DeMille’s first...
by Dale Dalenberg | Oct 8, 2019 | Criterion Eclipse Series, Reviews
Ingmar Bergman’s first stamp on the film world was his brooding screenplay for Torment (1944) about a high school senior trying (and ultimately failing) to finish his finals and graduate despite a sadistic Latin teacher and a relationship with a troubled...
by Dale Dalenberg | Sep 15, 2019 | Disney, Reviews
The conventional wisdom is that Fantasia (1940) was a box office flop, and that Walt Disney abandoned the idea of having a rotating set of cartoons set to music form the basis for an ever evolving film. However, Fantasia went on to become a beloved classic and did...
by Dale Dalenberg | Jul 6, 2019 | Alfred Hitchcock, Movies, Reviews
Here is Hitchcock’s 13th feature film as director, and by now several of his cinematic signatures are beginning to coalesce. We have the trademark cameo as he walks by the scene of the murder early in the film. And we have “the wrong man” plot,...
by Dale Dalenberg | Jul 4, 2019 | Movies, Reviews, Sunday Film Series
On the surface a parody of Jacques Cousteau’s undersea documentaries, but even if you were born too late to grow up on Cousteau on television, this is a brilliant masterpiece of understated droll comedy with a touch of Chaplinesque pathos. Starring Bill Murray,...
by Dale Dalenberg | Nov 8, 2016 | Movies, people, Reviews
The pioneers of Direct Cinema are about gone. D. A. Pennebaker hangs on at 91 years of age, looking remarkably spry. But Robert Drew, Albert Maysles, and Richard Leacock have all passed on. There was a time in the early 1960’s when these men, along...
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