Blue Underground
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Judas and the Black Messiah, Vigilante and Rituals: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
One of the best American films of recent years drops on HBOMax (and on big screens where theatres are open) today with the release of director Shaka King’s mesmerizing Judas and the Black Messiah, a film about slain Black Panther leader Fred Hampton that skillfully avoids bio-pic cliches with its sophisticated dual narrative and arresting ’70s crime flick style. Daniel Kaluuya is the best he’s ever been in a performance that forcefully conveys Hampton’s iconic power and humanizes him at the same time; costar Lakeith Stanfield is equally strong as William O’Neal, an FBI informant who sells out Hampton and […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 13, 2021 -
Christ Stopped at Eboli, Lucio Fulci in 4K and Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
When Francesco Rosi adapted artist and activist Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli for Italian television in 1979, contemporary observers of the director probably saw it as a strange choice. Rosi had made his name with searing, forcefully immediate studies of Italian society and politics like Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Over the City; Levi’s book about his banishment to an isolated rural town during the reign of Mussolini was as modest and personal as Rosi’s earlier films were sweeping and elaborate. Yet the memoir had in fact been a dream project of Rosi’s for decades, and the four-part, […]
by Jim Hemphill on Sep 11, 2020 -
Maniac, Flashdance and Fatal Attraction: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
In late 1979, Joe Spinell was a successful character actor who had appeared in major films by Coppola, Friedkin, Scorsese and Mazursky, but he wanted to go beyond supporting work to make a name for himself as a horror icon. His friend William Lustig was a 24-year old movie fanatic who had directed a couple of adult films and was hungry to graduate to mainstream features. Joining forces with producer Andrew Garroni, Lustig and Spinell scraped together $48,000 and started making Maniac, an extremely unpleasant – and extremely effective – study of a psychotic loner on a killing spree. They […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 30, 2020
