|
|
|
Little Drummer Girl
: essential video:Middle-eastern terrorism provides the dense, perpetually timely context of The Little Drummer Girl, loyally adapted from John Le Carré's complex bestseller. It's slow going at first, taking pains to establish the tragically complicated plight of Charlie (Diane Keaton), a left-wing, pro-Palestinian actress, recruited by Israeli intelligence in 1981 to play the role of a lifetime: Once her loyalties are turned, she will lure a dominant Palestinian terrorist (Sami Frey) into a deadly trap. She's an unwitting pawn, vulnerable to romance (particularly with her ...
|
|
|
Bond: On Her Majesty's Secret Service
: :Australian model George Lazenby took up the mantle of the world's most suave secret agent when Sean Connery retired as James Bond--prematurely, it turned out. Connery returned in Diamonds Are Forever before leaving the role to Roger Moore and Lazenby's subsequent career fizzled, yet this one-hit wonder is responsible for one of the best Bond films of all time. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 007 leaves the Service to privately pursue his SPECTRE nemesis Blofeld (played this time by Telly Savalas), whose latest master ...
|
|
|
North By Northwest
: essential video:A strong candidate for the most sheerly entertaining and enjoyable movie ever made by a Hollywood studio (with Citizen Kane, Only Angels Have Wings and Trouble in Paradise running neck and neck). Positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo (1958) and the stark horror of Psycho (1960), North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred Hitchcock at his most effervescent in a romantic comedy-thriller that also features one of the definitive Cary Grant performances. Which is not to say that this is ...
|
|
|
Condorman
: :A pre-Phantom Michael Crawford plays Woody, a goofy cartoonist-accidentally-turned-spy in this Cold War-era lark. In Paris visiting his friend, a CIA 'file clerk,' Woody is sent on a cloak-and-dagger errand and is mistaken for an operative by his beautiful Russian counterpart. She then contacts the agency with the demand that he, and only he, help her defect. Writer adopts comic book persona and voilà: Condorman! This wide-winged hero thwarts the pesky Soviets at every turn. From the old run-down farmer's truck he's driving emerges a ...
|
|
|
Torn Curtain
: :Paul Newman and Julie Andrews star in what must unfortunately be called one of Alfred Hitchcock's lesser efforts. Still, sub-par Hitchcock is better than a lot of what's out there, and this one is well worth a look. Newman plays cold war physicist Michael Armstrong, while Andrews plays his lovely assistant-and-fiancée, Sarah Sherman. Armstrong has been working on a missile defense system that will 'make nuclear defense obsolete,' and naturally both sides are very interested. All Sarah cares about is the fact that Michael has ...
|
|
|
Funeral in Berlin
: :Paul Newman and Julie Andrews star in what must unfortunately be called one of Alfred Hitchcock's lesser efforts. Still, sub-par Hitchcock is better than a lot of what's out there, and this one is well worth a look. Newman plays cold war physicist Michael Armstrong, while Andrews plays his lovely assistant-and-fiancée, Sarah Sherman. Armstrong has been working on a missile defense system that will 'make nuclear defense obsolete,' and naturally both sides are very interested. All Sarah cares about is the fact that Michael has ...
|
|
|
Fourth Protocol
: :Frederick Forsyth wrote the novel and screenplay for this story about a plot to stage an enormous nuclear accident in England, a catastrophe so large that its source can never be identified but will lead to assumptions that America is behind it. Michael Caine plays an aging intelligence agent who picks up clues that the ingredients for such an apocalypse are being smuggled piece-by-piece into the U.K.--but he cannot seem to get his superiors to care. Caine is outstanding in a role that seems tailor-made ...
|
|
|
The Ipcress File
: essential video:In the spy-crazed film world of the 1960s, Len Deighton's antihero Harry Palmer burst onto the scene as an antidote to the James Bond films. Here was a British spy who had a working-class accent and horn-rimmed glasses and above all really didn't want to be a spy in the first place. As portrayed by Michael Caine, Palmer was the perfect antithesis to Sean Connery's 007. Unlike that of his globetrotting spy cousin, Palmer's beat is cold, rainy, dreary London, where he spends ...
|
|
|
Ipcress File
: essential video:In the spy-crazed film world of the 1960s, Len Deighton's antihero Harry Palmer burst onto the scene as an antidote to James Bond. Here was a British spy who had a working-class accent, horn-rimmed glasses, and above all really didn't want to be a spy in the first place. As portrayed by Michael Caine, Palmer was the perfect antithesis to Sean Connery's 007. Unlike the globetrotting spy's exotic locales, Palmer's beat is cold, rainy, and dreary London, where he spends his days and ...
|
|
|
The World Is Not Enough
: :In his 19th screen outing, Ian Fleming's superspy is once again caught in the crosshairs of a self-created dilemma: as the longest-running feature-film franchise, James Bond is an annuity his producers want to protect, yet the series' consciously formulaic approach frustrates any real element of surprise beyond the rote application of plot twists or jump cuts to shake up the audience. This time out, credit 007's caretakers for making some visible attempts to invest their principal characters with darker motives--and blame them for squandering The ...
|
|