America’s greatest living action filmmaker returns in top form in The Assignment, the deliriously entertaining new film from director Walter Hill. The premise, from a screenplay co-written by Hill and Denis Hamill, is pure lurid pulp: male assassin Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez) runs afoul of a brilliant but deranged surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) who has him abducted and knocked unconscious. When Frank comes to, he discovers that he’s been surgically altered and now has the body of a woman – a revelation that only briefly slows down his obsessive quest for revenge. It’s a provocative conceit that might be offensive in […]

Two very different but equally essential classics find their way to Blu-ray and DVD this week courtesy of the Criterion Collection, which has issued exemplary special editions of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). The Antonioni film, in which a fashion photographer finds evidence of a murder in one of his stills, heavily influenced later American political thrillers like The Conversation and Blow Out in spite of the fact that Blow-Up itself is less a mystery than an anthropological document of swinging ’60s London. It was Antonioni’s first film outside his home country after L’avventura, La Notte, […]

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, Warner Archive has released a gorgeous Blu-ray of Francis Coppola’s Finian’s Rainbow, a flawed but fascinating musical that marked a key moment in the director’s development. At the time, Coppola was a young filmmaker of promise who had worked in erotica (Tonight For Sure) and for Roger Corman (Dementia 13) before scoring a theatrical release for his UCLA thesis film You’re a Big Boy Now (1966). Coppola’s goal was to use that movie as a launching pad for a career writing and directing small personal films, but Jack Warner made him, to reference […]

I’d like to kick this week’s column off with a pair of television recommendations: one a smart and stylish contemporary series that’s currently streaming, the other a retrospective pick on DVD that deserves to be better known. Stitchers puts an ingenious spin on one of the most shopworn of all television genres, the procedural, breathing new life into the form via an elegant visual style and audacious premise. The show follows Kirsten Clark (Emma Ishta), a Caltech student with a medical condition that wreaks havoc on her sense of time. It also makes her a desirable candidate for a covert […]

Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1975) is an idiosyncratic but fascinating blend of incongruous tones made all the stranger by the difference in sensibilities among the men behind the camera. The film started as a script by brothers Paul and Leonard Schrader, who sold it for a boatload of cash thanks to the high-concept premise: an ex-soldier from the U.S. travels to Japan and infiltrates the underworld in a mash-up of the American action flick and the Asian martial arts film. Once Pollack came on board to direct the movie became something less commercial but, in its way, more compelling; uncomfortable […]

In a career-spanning interview with Polly Platt for the DGA oral history series, director Henry Hathaway dismissed his 1956 thriller 23 Paces to Baker Street as a throwaway, one of those studio assignments he took without much relish. It’s yet another example of why filmmakers cannot be trusted when it comes to their own films, for while the material is slightly shopworn (and owes an enormous and obvious debt to Hitchcock’s Rear Window), Hathaway frames it with meticulous care and artistry. The movie follows Van Johnson as a blind playwright who thinks he overhears a crime being plotted; after the […]

Don Chaffey’s One Million Years B.C. (1966) is probably best remembered for its iconic poster image of scantily clad cavewoman Raquel Welch, but revisiting it via Kino Lorber’s excellent new Blu-ray release reveals it to be a far more — and in some ways less — interesting film than that. Less in the sense that it doesn’t really deliver the sexy goods promised by the famous marketing, but more for film buffs who will delight in the movie’s multitude of connections to other, often wildly disparate, classics of the era. It’s a surprisingly experimental movie in some ways, telling its […]

This week sees the Blu-ray release of one of the greatest of all silent comedies via Kino’s exceptional high-def transfer of Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) – though to categorize it as a mere comedy is a bit limiting. The film contains wall-to-wall laughs to be sure, but it’s also the most enduring action film of its era, a chase movie that still, over ninety years later, has the ability to awe the viewer with its flawless intersection of conceptual ambition, meticulously executed stunts, and visual elegance. Following essentially the same structure as Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie consists […]

Paul Bartel’s 1975 road race movie Death Race 2000 is one of the great exploitation films of all time, a model of how to use the creative freedom of working with limited resources within a marketable genre for the purposes of subversive satire. Produced by Roger Corman, it has a deliciously nasty premise: in the (then) future, the population is kept pacified by gory reality entertainment in the form of a cross-country road race in which drivers receive points for mowing down pedestrians. Bartel and screenwriters Robert Thom and Charles Griffith milk this conceit for all that it’s worth, ramping […]

When director of photography Nancy Schreiber receives the Presidents Award at the 31st annual ASC Awards this Saturday, she’ll make history as the first woman to be honored with the award. It’s an appropriate – some might say overdue – recognition of an innovator who has consistently broken new ground in the fields of documentary, narrative features, and television. An early proponent of digital technology (she won the cinematography prize at Sundance in 2004 for her mini-DV work on November), Schreiber is also a fierce advocate for celluloid who creates stunning, expressive images regardless of the format. Her range is second to […]