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Au hasard Balthazar (1966)
Filmmaker(s): Robert Bresson

The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.

Burdens the celebration a film has garnered becomes a burden. This is perhaps the most burdened of all the films I know. The Criterion DVD has a French TeeVee program made when the film was released. It features French intellectual celebrities (which is what France...


Published November 28, 2022
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The Judy Garland Show (1963-1964)

The Judy Garland Show is an American musical variety television series that aired on CBS on Sunday nights during the 1963-1964 television season. Despite a sometimes stormy relationship with Judy Garland, CBS had found success with several television specials featuring the star. Garland, who for years had been reluctant to commit to a weekly series, saw the show as her best chance to pull herself out of severe financial difficulties. Production difficulties beset the series almost from the beginning. The series had three different producers in the course of its 26 episodes and went through a number of other key personnel changes. With the change in producers also came changes to the show's format, which started as comedy/variety but switched to an almost purely concert format. While Garland herself was popular with critics, the initial variety format and her co-star, Jerry Van Dyke, were not. The show competed with Bonanza, then the fourth most popular program on television, and consistently performed poorly in the ratings. Although fans rallied in an attempt to save the show, CBS cancelled it after a single season. TV Guide included the series in their 2013 list of 60 shows that were "Cancelled Too Soon".

Bet Your Life skill and training are one thing, Encountering someone with these qualities who is willing to commit everything in a performance is yet another thing. Judy had a TeeVee variety show like dozens of others but she was totally unlike any of them....


Published January 19, 2024
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Knife in the Water (1962)
Acclaimed by all! Roman Polanski's tense, ironic Drama!
Filmmaker(s): Roman Polanski

On their way to an afternoon on the lake, husband and wife Andrzej and Krystyna nearly run over a young hitchhiker. Inviting the young man onto the boat with them, Andrzej begins to subtly torment him; the hitchhiker responds by making overtures toward Krystyna. When the hitchhiker is accidentally knocked overboard, the husband's panic results in unexpected consequences.

Lubricated Blade is nothing more thrilling than discovering a natural filmmaker for the first time. There are only so many, and you can only have cinema menarche once. It is an introduction into another life. I first saw this in 1965 at the Orson Welles Cinema...


Published March 2, 2023
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The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)
Alive... without a body... fed by an unspeakable horror from hell!
Filmmaker(s): Joseph Green

Dr. Bill Cortner and his fiancée, Jan Compton, are driving to his lab when they get into a horrible car accident. Compton is decapitated. But Cortner is not fazed by this seemingly insurmountable hurdle. His expertise is in transplants, and he is excited to perform the first head transplant. Keeping Compton's head alive in his lab, Cortner plans the groundbreaking yet unorthodox surgery. First, however, he needs a body.

Brainy a little annoyed at the folks that poke fun at this. Sure, all the production values are poor, but this is just a matter of degree. If perfected imagination is defined as the images you dream and you set that at 100, well maybe this...


Published April 20, 2024
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Exodus (1960)
The drama and the passion of one of the epic events of the twentieth century !
Filmmaker(s): Otto Preminger

Ari Ben Canaan, a passionate member of the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah, attempts to transport 600 Jewish refugees on a dangerous voyage from Cyprus to Palestine on a ship named the Exodus. He faces obstruction from British forces, who will not grant the ship passage to its destination.

Stalled Ship wonder what damage we are doing to ourselves by writing false history. All history is fictional. It must be because it abstracts single narratives from the hubbub of life. We hope that the narrative models something that can be traced back to facts, can...


Published May 13, 2022
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Atom Age Vampire (1960)
You'll gasp with Horror...
Filmmaker(s): Anton Giulio Majano

When a singer is horribly disfigured in a car accident, a scientist develops a treatment which can restore her beauty by injecting her with a special serum. While performing the procedure, however, he falls in love with her. As the treatment begins to fail, he determines to save her appearance, regardless of how many women he must kill for her sake.

Unexpected Assembly don't suppose many people have the time for watching bad movies in the hope of transcendent insights. If you are one of these, let me save you some time. This might be on your list. Yes, I know it is yet another cheapo; made...


Published May 16, 2023
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Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
No search of human emotions has ever probed so deeply, so truthfully as… Anatomy of a Murder.
Filmmaker(s): Otto Preminger

Semi-retired Michigan lawyer Paul Biegler takes the case of Army Lt. Manion, who murdered a local innkeeper after his wife claimed that he raped her. Over the course of an extensive trial, Biegler parries with District Attorney Lodwick and out-of-town prosecutor Claude Dancer to set his client free, but his case rests on the victim's mysterious business partner, who's hiding a dark secret.

Drunk Lawyers seems to be a sub-genre of movies that feature drunk or downtrodden lawyers taking on cases and winning. This is sometimes associated with the “courtroom” film where reality is unfolded according to specific rules, coloured by human dynamics. And this is under the...


Published April 2, 2023
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I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)
Shuddery things from beyond the stars, here to breed with human women!
Filmmaker(s): Gene Fowler Jr.

Aliens from Outer Space are slowly switching places with real humans -- one of the first being a young man about to get married. Slowly, his new wife realizes something is wrong, and her suspicions are confirmed when her husband's odd behaviour begins to show up in other townspeople.

Watching Them Watching Us suppose there are many ways of watching movies as there are of eating, a lot. But most folks seem to do it quickly, without savour. So from time to time it is worth watching an old movie with little merit just...


Published May 16, 2022
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The Hideous Sun Demon (1958)
The Blaze Of The Sun Made Him A Monster!

After exposure to radiation, an atomic research scientist finds himself changing into a murderous, lizard-like creature every time he is exposed to sunlight.

Rays of these old things are great. The absolute maturity of the genre creates a purity that you can see because all the normal movie stuff (plot, acting, story, production) falls away and you deal with the saints and angels of the cinematic universe. But that’s...


Published November 29, 2022
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The Abominable Snowman (1957)
See It With Someone Brave! -- A Timeless Terror to Freeze You to Your Seats!
Filmmaker(s): Val Guest

A kindly English botanist and a gruff American promoter lead an expedition to the Himalayas in search of the legendary Yeti.

High Praise Hammer became possessed by demons from the grave, they experimented with other supernatural horror. This is a particularly good one for the period, employing lots of location shots in the mountains. Those mountains provide two key elements of the story: isolation and Tibetan mystics....


Published February 12, 2023
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