Based on Ross Macdonald’s novel The Moving Target,?Harper?(1966)?was Paul Newman’s starring turn as the detective who would pursue missing persons and find the truth. In the vein of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, Harper is an adaptation of Archer, Macdonald’s creation, by renowned screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, All the President’s…
From 2001 to 2004, Simon Baker (The Mentalist) starred in The Guardian, as a corporate lawyer convicted of drug abuse who finds himself assigned to the Legal Services office of Pittsburgh. He’s cutthroat and thorough as a businessman, but when he finds himself face-to-face with minors who can’t speak for themselves, he discovers a new…
All they wanted was a boys’ night out at a boxing match… Director Stephen Hopkins made his bones with tension-filled action flicks like?Predator 2,?Blown Away, and?The Ghost in the Darkness, while also marking the opening salvo of?24?with his direction. But in 1993’s?Judgment Night, he directs a quartet of young actors as suburban young adults trapped…
Warner Bros. has released a 1959 Technicolor Western,?The Hanging Tree, starring Gary Cooper in high definition, nearly sixty years after the film’s release and Cooper’s death. Snatching it up to cover for #TBT, I grabbed some sandwiches and headed to a retirees’ house for a lunch date. I was astonished to find that this couple…
Every once and awhile, I come across an animated film I haven’t seen. Still, I was amazed to discover that there was a film that Arthur Rankin Jr. and?Jules Bass (Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, The Hobbit, Thundercats) produced, with Romeo Muller’s script, Don Maclean’s music, and starring the voices of John Ritter,…
I was in college, of prime draft age, when M*A*S*H hit the theaters in 1970. That probably says a lot about what I found so appealing about that film when I first saw it.
One of my earliest cinematic memories is watching?The Miracle Worker?at school. In fact, we watched it for multiple years, to the disgust of my friends, while I found myself captivated by the determined insistence of Annie Sullivan to help Helen Keller learn to communicate. There was beauty there, back in the black and white narrative…
If I thought I received some crazy looks when I admitted that I hadn?t watched Indiana Jones, I was in no way prepared for the outright shock from some when I said the words, ?I?ve never seen The Goonies.?? I guess as a child of the 80?s, it was merely assumed that I had viewed…
In Junior Bonner, Steve McQueen finds himself playing an over-the-hill rodeo rider, between?Bullitt?and?The Getaway?in 1972. Working with violent Western director Sam Peckinpah, McQueen helps tell a story that is not filled with gun violence, but does tell of a dramatic change in the lives of its characters and the America of the twentieth century. Junior…
Joe Roberts has tried to do right by his family, first working hard on a farm that was foreclosed on and then reluctantly picking up the badge of a small Nebraska town sheriff. Now, as his troubled brother Frank returns to town, Roberts is faced with choices about loyalty to family or adhering to the…
