To view L’assassinat du Père Noël click here First of all, let it be said that this film has one of my all-time favorite opening credit sequences. It’s almost a lost art these days how much impact you can have on an audience the first time they see a film’s title blasted on a theatrical […]

To view The Wind and the Lion click here. A stunning epic adventure that would have been a massive hit had it been released ten years earlier, The Wind and the Lion (1975) is one of those movies I always look forward to revisiting every few years. Its unusual, clear-eyed look at global relations and […]

To view Harold and Maude click here. Anyone who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s probably remembers their first viewing of Harold and Maude (1971). For me it came in the early days of cable TV when HBO and Cinemax started running it in the afternoons on Saturday and Sunday; after all, it […]

To view Donkey Skin click here. I always love seeing what happens when international directors make it big on the foreign-language film circuit and start getting pressured to shoot films in English. The results tend to fall into certain categories: divisive but with fan followings, as in the case of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) […]

To view The Captive Heart click here. In the past, several of us here have been tipping our hats to the rich variety of films here at FilmStruck representing the underrated British filmmaker Basil Dearden, from his earliest days at Ealing Studios to his very last feature film (The Man Who Haunted Himself [1970]). Now it’s time […]

To view Black Jesus click here. I’d honestly be shocked if more than a handful of people around here have heard of Black Jesus (1968) before today. Barely released in American theaters by one-shot outfit Plaza Pictures and never given a legitimate home video release (ignore the bootleg DVDs), this is a rough, tough and […]

To view Ugly, Dirty and Bad click here. Of the major names in the film world who passed away in 2016, one that got overlooked a bit, at least among Americans, was Ettore Scola. A tricky guy to pin down over the course of his career, Scola was largely regarded as a comedy director but […]

To view Forever Amber click here. Now here’s a film with three of my favorite things from 1940s movies: Linda Darnell, Otto Preminger and blazing Technicolor. Seen today it’s hard to believe Forever Amber (1947) was a major scandal in the Hollywood press when the opulent 20th Century Fox period piece ran into trouble with the […]

To view Went the Day Well? click here. It always warms my heart to see how many Ealing Studios films we have stacked around here at FilmStruck. Rivaled perhaps only by Hammer Film Productions, it’s one of the most-loved brand names in British cinema, especially in its native country, and one I’ve happily brought up […]

To view The Man Who Haunted Himself click here. A couple of weeks back I took a look at a neglected but stunning early entry in the career of Basil Dearden, Frieda(1947), and now it’s time to go all the way to the other end of his career with his very last feature film: The […]