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Twilight (1998)
: essential video:If it hadn't been released in 1998 with a veteran cast of Hollywood's finest, you could swear that Twilight was a movie from the 1940s--the kind of intelligent mystery that would've made Humphrey Bogart feel right at home. To be sure, that was exactly the intention of director and co-writer Robert Benton (in collaboration with Nobody's Fool writer Richard Russo), but the film's blessing is also its curse. Benton and Russo are so enamored of vintage mystery plots and characters that their movie ...
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Rear Window
: essential video:Like the Greenwich Village courtyard view from its titular portal, Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window is both confined and multileveled: both its story and visual perspective are dictated by its protagonist's imprisonment in his apartment, convalescing in a wheelchair, from which both he and the audience observe the lives of his neighbors. Cheerful voyeurism, as well as the behavior glimpsed among the various tenants, affords a droll comic atmosphere that gradually darkens when he sees clues to what may be a murder. Photographer ...
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Midnight Lace
: essential video:Like the Greenwich Village courtyard view from its titular portal, Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window is both confined and multileveled: both its story and visual perspective are dictated by its protagonist's imprisonment in his apartment, convalescing in a wheelchair, from which both he and the audience observe the lives of his neighbors. Cheerful voyeurism, as well as the behavior glimpsed among the various tenants, affords a droll comic atmosphere that gradually darkens when he sees clues to what may be a murder. Photographer ...
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Rebecca
: essential video:Rebecca is an ageless, timeless adult movie about a woman who marries a widower but fears she lives in the shadow of her predecessor. This was Hitchcock's first American feature, and it garnered the Best Picture statue at the 1941 Academy Awards. In today's films, most twists and surprises are ridiculous or just gratuitous, so it's sobering to look back on this film where every revelation not only shocks, but makes organic sense with the story line. Laurence Olivier is dashing and weak, ...
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Harper
: :The reason to see Harper is the kooky mid-Sixties design, the peculiar over-the-hill-gang supporting cast, and the crazy Rat Pack lingo written by famed screenwriter William Goldman. And, of course, Paul Newman fans will want to see their guy in the full flower of his anti-hero hero phase. Anyone seeking a decent adaptation of Ross Macdonald's great series of detective novels will, however, be sorely disappointed. Macdonald's Lew Archer is a melancholy knight who operates in an increasingly somber tangle of family crimes; the movie's ...
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Tales of Manhattan
: :The reason to see Harper is the kooky mid-Sixties design, the peculiar over-the-hill-gang supporting cast, and the crazy Rat Pack lingo written by famed screenwriter William Goldman. And, of course, Paul Newman fans will want to see their guy in the full flower of his anti-hero hero phase. Anyone seeking a decent adaptation of Ross Macdonald's great series of detective novels will, however, be sorely disappointed. Macdonald's Lew Archer is a melancholy knight who operates in an increasingly somber tangle of family crimes; the movie's ...
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Where the Money Is
: :Linda Fiorentino is her lean, sexy self as Carol, a former prom queen who's grown up to be a nurse in an old-age home, which isn't quite what she imagined her future would be. She's married to her prom king, Wayne (Dermot Mulroney), who's grown a little dull. Then Henry (Paul Newman) gets delivered into her care. He's an imprisoned bank robber who has had a stroke. Or has he? Carol begins to try to suss him out, even going so far as to straddle ...
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Quigley Down Under
:Description:Tom Selleck gives the boldest performance of his career in this 'new style, revisionist western with the panoramic scope of a movie epic' (Los Angeles Times). Fierce gunfights, forbidding landscapes, breakneck chasesall hallmarks of the classic westernare reinvented in this hard-pounding actioner that 'revitalizes the genre' and comes out 'a sure winner' (The Hollywood Reporter). Arriving in Australia with nothing more than a saddle and his prized six-foot Sharps rifle, American sharpshooter Matthew Quigley thinks he's been hired to kill off wild dogs. But when ...
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The Usual Suspects
:Description:Winner of two 1995 Academy Awards(r), including Best Original Screenplay, this masterful, atmospheric film noir enraptured audiences with its complex and riveting storyline, gritty, tour-de-force performances (including an Oscar(r)-winning* turn by Kevin Spacey) and a climax that is truly deserving of the word stunning. Also starring Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri, Kevin Pollak and Pete Postlethwaite, this 'thoroughly engrossing film (HBO) is so gripping and diabolically clever (The Wall Street Journal) that it becomes a maze you'll be happy to get lost in (Los ...
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Spellbound
: essential video:Alfred Hitchcock takes on Sigmund Freud in this thriller in which psychologist Ingrid Bergman tries to solve a murder by unlocking the clues hidden in the mind of amnesiac suspect Gregory Peck. Among the highlights is a bizarre dream sequence seemingly designed by Salvador Dali--complete with huge eyeballs and pointy scissors. Although the film is in black and white, the original release contained one subliminal blood-red frame, appearing when a gun pointed directly at the camera goes off. Spellbound is one of Hitchcock's ...
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Diesel vehicles have nearly a 50-percent market share in Europe, thanks to tax incentives and diesel-friendly legislation across the EU. Diesels are so passé there that you can buy a BMW 730d and no one will think it odd that your luxury car burns oil. Pull up in a diesel 7-Series in America and people would leer at you like you've alighted from an amphibious vehicle reeking of saltwater and dead trout.