The Tailor of Panama

I think this film almost works. Almost. Not quite, though. There's a saggy middle section that just drags the whole affair down without building up the tension like it probably should that the rest of the film can't get past. However, the first third and final third are actually quite adept at pulling together this…

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Deliverance

If you've ever wanted to make a movie where a handful of guys wander around the woods for most of the runtime, I'm not sure you could find a better model than John Boorman's Deliverance, based on the book and script by James Dickey. Apparently Sam Peckinpah was interested in adapting the book at the…

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

#9 in my ranking of Ernst Lubitsch's filmography. It's interesting to contrast Ernst Lubitsch's effort at directly dealing with Nazism against Fritz Lang's. Lubitsch had the advantage of leaving Germany in the early 20s, well before the rise of Hitler while Lang left in 1933 right as they claimed power over the legislature and Hitler's…

The Eyes of the Mummy

#36 in my ranking of Ernst Lubitsch's filmography. If there's one kind of film Ernst Lubitsch is known for it's...globe-trotting adventure stories? Okay, it's early in his career, well before he'd developed the Lubitsch touch much less made it his signature, but this is just so strikingly different from everything I know about him that…

Absolute Power

#15 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. This is a real change of direction for Eastwood. The Bridges of Madison County following the elegiac A Perfect World felt like a natural progression, but moving from The Bridges of Madison County to a violent, Hitchcockian thriller about corruption at the highest levels of governmental power…