In Search of Fellini is a strange,offbeat, quirky filmwhich was inspired by a true story from co-screenwriter NancyCartwright (voiceof Bart Simpson on The Simpsons). Executive produced by MonikaBacardi,Maria Bello, Kevin J. Burke,Nancy Cartwright, and Andrea Iervolino, InSearch of Fellini is a odd little indie move which has its heartin theright place but absolutely falters as an experience.

Lucy (Ksenia Solo) is a young, naive woman whostumbles upona film festival playing a series of Federico Fellini films. After shesees themagnificent La Strada for the first time she becomes completelyenthralled in the rich imagery and storytelling. Lucy falls in lovewith Fellini'sfilms. It's love at firs...Read the entire review

The Movie:
There's a peculiar dichotomy about Valkyrie. It's undeniably entertaining, slickly made, has good to excellent performances, and yet it elicits barely a reaction the entire way through its two or so hours. Part of this may be from the dramatic inertia of knowing going in how it will all end (does anybody not know that Hitler wasn't assassinated?). But I think the more telling problem with this film is its point of view and how it treats its characters. Everyone in this film, none more so than its putative hero, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), is a cipher. There's virtually no background given, no real character motivations are ever explicated, and the result is a film where a lot happens, but none of it matters very much. This film about the most relatively successful of many plots to assassinate the Fuhrer works sporadically as a procedural, but if...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Bryan Singer's Valkyrie could end up becoming one of those textbook cases of "What went wrong?" Though the Tom Cruise WWII-vehicle started with high aspirations, an instant confluence of hype and snark ensured the film was somehow only ever going to reach the middle distance in all things. A tepid critical response, respectable but not dynamic box office, and, if word of mouth was to be believed, complete public indifference made Valkyrie appear to be more of a failure than it likely was. From the director who changed superhero movies with the first two X-Men flicks and nearly did the impossible and made Superman interesting, and from a former box office juggernaut like Cruise, more was expected than just barely making the studio's mon...Read the entire review

Carve Her Name With Pride may be the pinnacle of the self-congratulatory British "we won the war" film, the mostly 1950s-era picture that sought to remind a public still faced with shortages and a sagging economy, that something great had been accomplished. The rather downbeat story deals with the true experience of Violette Szabo, a young Englishwoman who became a resistance liaison in occupied France in 1944. Certain details of the story weren't divulged until just a few years ago, with the publication of Leo Marks' book Between Silk and Cyanide.

The film cemented the career of actress Virginia McKenna, best known to Americans as the star of Read the entire review

The Film:
Sergio Leone is the director most closely associated with the European-produced westerns popularly referred to as "spaghetti westerns." Leone's classics Dollars trilogy starring Clint Eastwood--A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly--are arguably the most popular and well known spaghetti westerns, and helped establish the director as the genre's preeminent filmmaker. And while Leone is popularly thought of as the director who gave life to the spaghetti western, it would be the other Sergio--director Sergio Corbucci--that gave the genre its soul.

There was somewhere close to 600 spaghetti westerns produced in the 1960s and 1970s; but despite that incredible number, only a small are worth remembering, let alone any good. Of the westerns produced some of the best the genre has to offer were directed by Corbucci. ...Read the entire review

Reviewers love The One That Got Away: with that title, nobody will accuse them of spoiling the movie. This well-made English film recounts the true story of the only German officer pilot of WW2 to escape from British captivity. There are escape movies and escape movies, but this one has a fascinating difference. Only ten years after the war, the English make a movie about a fervent German enemy who foiled their best attempts to keep him under guard -- and he's treated as the hero of the show. The One That Got Away is good public relations for the concept of English sportsmanship.

The German flier is Hardy Krüger, the postwar star of the West German film industry who broke out into solid roles in international films, notably Hatari! and Read the entire review

MGM has released a disappointingly bare-bones edition of one of the best Westerns of the 1950s, Man of the West, directed by Anthony Mann and starring Gary Cooper. Not a hit when originally released in 1958, Man of the West's reputation has grown significantly over the years, with its influence seen in countless, later "adult" and "spaghetti" westerns. Brutal, vicious, and complex, with typically stunning, meaningful location work by Mann, Man of the West looks quite good here in its original CinemaScope ratio, but the lack of any extras - not even a trailer - is curious considering the film's overall standing in the Western oeuvre.

Cooper plays Link Jones, who's on his way to Fort Worth to hire a school teacher for his town, Good Hope. Riding t...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Updated 4/9/2008.

It's my belief that art should be allowed to reflect the times, and artists should have the freedom to stretch out and create material that touches on what is happening in the world around them. Thus, I have no problem with political filmmaking. I do, however, have a problem when a director wags his finger at the audience and let's the message of the picture get in the way of the film's primary function as story. This makes Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs a bit of a frustrating 90 minutes. For about 60 of them, the veteran performer is right on the money; for the other 30, his finger is so close to your face, you'll think you can lean forward and bite it off.

Screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan, who also stirred ...Read the entire review

The Movies:

Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is a detective working the homicide beat in Philadelphia who goes back home to the Southern United States to visit his aging mother. When he shows up a white man of high social stature is found murdered. Tibbs is arrested simply because the color of his skin makes the local authorities suspicious that he may have had something to do with the killing.

Eventually the police realize who he is and he's released, but not before Tibbs' superior officer offers his skills as a detective to the southern police who are in dire need of help, not having much experience with these types of cases at all. Tibbs begrudgingly works together with the local police chief, Bill Gillespie (played brilliantly by Rod Steiger) who eventually comes to respect him even if he has trouble admitting it. Together they set out to find who killed the man and as they do so, t...Read the entire review

The Movie

The story of Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett is one of rock legend, but also a profoundly sad and human one. In the John Edginton-directed BBC documentary, The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story, all of the major players in this all too brief period of rock history recount their experiences with the now-reclusive musical madman.

In 1964, just as The Beatles were conquering America, another big Brit act was in its formative stages: Pink Floyd. Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright formed the core of what would become Pink Floyd in 1964, when all three were attending the Regent Street School of Polytechnics in London. After a handful of personnel and name changes, the trio picked up fellow art student Syd Barrett, whose keen lyrical voice and razor-sharp pop sensibility helped propel Pink Floyd to the forefront of the mod London art scene of the late Sixties.

Bob Fosse would not be amused. Come to think of it, neither would Charles Dickens. When De-Lovely, director Irwin Winkler's bathetic ode to that great musical genius Cole Porter opens, an elderly Porter (Kevin Kline) is rolled out by a demanding angel named Gabe (Jonathan Pryce) and given the "This Is Your Life" treatment. Glumly aping Fosse's beautifully and bizarrely rendered death throttle in All That Jazz with a ridiculous nod to A Christmas Carol, Gabe stage-directs Cole's life with key members walking out on stage and re-enacting what should be, a fascinating existence. No such luck.

Covering, mainly, his sexless marriage (again, sexed-up Fosse would not be amused) to the gorgeous socialite Linda Lee Thomas (Ashley Judd), this biopic loses the fun Porter so desired in life and instead, focuses on the frustrating--how DE-lightful. For sure, Porter's life wasn't one con...Read the entire review