Notícias

"Jacques Tourneur, Fearmaker" runs from December 14 – January 3, 2019 at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center.A man twists and contorts himself to fire his tommy gun from the front seat of a prop plane, strafing an escaping yacht in Jacques Tourneur’s Nick Carter, Master Detective (1939). The action scenes of the first (of only two) of MGM’s detective programmers starring Walter Pidgeon as a blasé, blowhard private dick go a long way to set thrilling standards of danger and energy in a prescient pre-war mystery of aviation espionage and sabotage. The opening scene in the desert of a foiled aircraft hijacking is already that Christopher Nolan-style of concept, grandeur and stark visuals, but the boat-gunning climax, created through great, swooning back projection and Carter’s nearly absurd violent technique, lends great character to an otherwise unpromising crime series.A gang leader huddled among anonymous criminals on a prison boat as “the Rock,...

Olivier Assayas. Photo by Locarno Festival / Massimo PedrazziniAt this year’s edition of the Locarno Festival, French filmmaker Olivier Assayas was the head of the main competition jury. As the festival drew to a close, we caught up with Assayas in the lobby of his hotel for an informal chat about viewing habits, mobile phones in cinema, and his upcoming project Ebook.Notebook: Have you seen any of the Jacques Tourneur movies from the festival's retrospective? Olivier Assayas: I’ve seen Out of the Past (1947) and Berlin Express (1948). Out of the Past I saw ages ago and Berlin Express I thought I had seen but no, this was the first time.Notebook: Do you like him?Assayas: I love Tourneur. I think he’s a genius—a great filmmaker. Well, I don’t know about a genius. Certainly a great filmmaker [laughs]. Notebook: I really like Berlin Express. It’s...

Days of Glory (1944)This year at the Locarno Festival I am looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes from films across the 70th edition's selection that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.***“Like anything you will ever tell me,” dreamily says a Soviet dancer-turned partisan (Tamara Toumanova) to her lover and commander Vladmir (Gregory Peck in his first role), “it’s learned by heart.” Days of Glory (1944), a highly evocative masterpiece from Jacques Tourneur conjured in that brief moment during World War 2 when Hollywood was asked to make movies in support of our Soviet allies, with disjunctive, lyrical surrealness casts this dancer among the hardened Russian soldiers isolated in a crumbling, underground redoubt behind enemy lines. She comes from a world of art unknown to these fighters,...

Merle Oberon films: From empress to duchess in 'Hotel.' Merle Oberon films: From starring to supporting roles Turner Classic Movies' Merle Oberon month comes to an end tonight, March 25, '16, with six movies: Désirée, Hotel, Deep in My Heart, Affectionately Yours, Berlin Express, and Night Song. Oberon's presence alone would have sufficed to make them all worth a look, but they have other qualities to recommend them as well. 'Désirée': First supporting role in two decades Directed by Henry Koster, best remembered for his Deanna Durbin musicals and the 1947 fantasy comedy The Bishop's Wife, Désirée (1954) is a sumptuous production that, thanks to its big-name cast, became a major box office hit upon its release. Marlon Brando is laughably miscast as Napoleon Bonaparte, while Jean Simmons plays the title role, the Corsican Conqueror's one-time fiancée Désirée Clary (later Queen of Sweden and Norway). In a supporting role – her...

Even when based on actual events, classical Hollywood movies never strive for painstaking factual accuracy. This is best exemplified by the ever-present legal disclaimer “The characters and incidents portrayed and the names used in this work are fictitious, and any resemblance to the name, character and history of any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental,” which appears not only in horror, sci-fi or musical extravaganzas, but also in biopics and historical reconstructions. In the latter two cases, the contradiction is only apparent. While using the above disclaimer (or variations thereof) to protect themselves from defamation lawsuits, the studios openly acknowledge what any person of common sense knows already: in the filmmaking business, dramatization and other poetic licenses are essential to tell and sell exciting stories to an audience, since reality is too boring and complex for an evening's entertainment. In other words, a commercial film is not a...

70s B-movie fave, Don’t Look in the Basement has been digitally restored and will be available on DVD Dec. 16 from Film Chest Media Group. The film will be presented with original sound and in a full frame aspect ration of 4x3 (which is a little weird as it was originally shot in 1.37:1, also known as "academy standard").

You can re-order the film here

In the film, a young, psychiatric nurse, Charlotte Beale (Rosie Holotik, 1972 Playboy covergirl), goes to work at an isolated sanitarium only to learn the proprietor, Dr. Stephens (Michael Harvey, Berlin Express, Tycoon), was murdered by one of [Continued ...]...

A young, psychiatric nurse struggles under the worst of institutional conditions in Don’t Look in the Basement, digitally restored and available on DVD Dec. 16 from Film Chest Media Group.

In this ‘70s, B-movie, cult classic, a young, psychiatric nurse, Charlotte Beale (Rosie Holotik, 1972 Playboy covergirl), goes to work at an isolated sanitarium only to learn the proprietor, Dr. Stephens (Michael Harvey, Berlin Express, Tycoon), was murdered by one of the patients.

Struggling … Continue reading →

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A young, psychiatric nurse struggles under the worst of institutional conditions in Don’t Look in the Basement, digitally restored and available on DVD December 16th from Film Chest Media Group.

In this ‘70s, B-movie, cult classic, a young, psychiatric nurse, Charlotte Beale (Rosie Holotik, 1972 Playboy covergirl), goes to work at an isolated sanitarium only to learn the proprietor, Dr. Stephens (Michael Harvey, Berlin Express, Tycoon), was murdered by one of the patients.

The post Restored Don’t Look in the Basement Arrives on DVD Next Month appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.

According to a title card at the end of Laissez-Passer, Bertrand Tavernier's fact-based drama of the French film industry in wartime, Maurice Tourneur hated the scripts of the few movies he made post-wwii. So there's that.

But his last film, Impasse des Deux Anges (1948), fascinates. If the script has a flaw, it's that it takes a very simple, predictable story (actress runs away from groom the night before her marriage, with an old lover who's also a jewel thief—pursued through the night by gangsters, they conclude their relationship so she can move on) and attempts to reinvigorate it at regular intervals with dizzying tonal shifts, implausible new characters and sub-plots, and ghostly, somnambular flashbacks. But the flaw is also a strength, since it makes the film jazzy, offbeat and strange.

As the "two angels" (though the title really refers to a dead-end street where they made love in...

Berlin -- The Berlin International Film Festival is going indie for its 60th anniversary with new films from Michael Winterbottom, Noah Baumbach, Thomas Vinterberg and other independent filmmakers among this year's competition lineup.

Baumbach's comedy "Greenberg" starring Ben Stiller as a New Yorker house sitting for his brother in Los Angeles, will have its world premiere in Berlin as will Vinterberg's latest, "Submario," a Danish drama that sees the director of "The Celebration" returning to the treacherous landscape of familial relationships.

Winterbottom's Western thriller "The Killer Inside Me" starring Casey Affleck will head to Berlin after its world premiere in Sundance, one of several titles catching the Park City-Berlin express this year. These include "Howl," a drama from famed documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman centered on poet Allen Ginsberg's 1957 obscenity trial; Nicole Holofcener's comedy "Please Give" starring Catherine Keener and Amanda Peet and Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids Are Alright.