One of the best swashbucklers ever made. Tyrone Power is Don Diego de Vega—the son of a nobleman out to save the peasants of Olde Californy (and Linda Darnell) from the villainous Basil Rathbone. Fantastic swordfights (Rathbone was an Olympic duellist), and Power shows exactly how derring-do should be done.
Totally rubbish teen comedy which sees a French girl (Coyote Ugly's Piper Perabo) invading Texas and fiendishly ruining the life of star cheerleader Jane McGregor. Not content with being bland and dull, its national stereotyping stops just short of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" gags.
After the ponderous Al and the not-as-clever-as-it-thought-it-was Minority Report, Spielberg delivers a sleek, slick 1960s-set caper movie based on a true story, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the teen con artist attempting to stay one step ahead of Tom Hanks' FBI agent. Leo's smug, Hanks is nerdish, but Spielberg carries off the action with flair.
The Family Way sees squeaky-clean Hayley Mills as the perfect daughter to real-life dad John in this cautionary 1966 tale of a young married couple struggling with financial hardships and the apparently grim realities of married life. Accident, on the other hand, is a brooding psychodrama, written by Harold Pinter, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Dirk Bogarde as a tragic philosophy professor obsessed by Jacqueline Sassard's voluptuous student.
Ulu Grosbard's sombre noir revolves around the infamous Black Dahlia murder that gripped 1940s Los Angeles. With Roberts De Niro and Duvall excellent as brothers caught up in the case—respectively, a repressed but ambitious priest, and a hardbitten homicide cop who suspects his sibling knows more than he should—it aims for a dark, sweeping resonance pitched somewhere between Chinatown and L.A. Confidential.
Nouvelle Vague-inspired camerawork plus a searing central turn from Carol White remain supremely effective in Ken Loach's 1965 teleplay about naïve bride Cathy (White) and her descent into poverty. The tone occasionally veers into public service hysteria, especially after the Capitalist State Apparatus removes Cathy from her tenement, fires her husband and steals her children. A landmark British film nonetheless.
The medium-defining shibboleth that induces paroxysms of adulation from film critics (but not filmgoers), Citizen Kane has become, in its inviolable immensity, the cinematic equivalent of its own overbearing protagonist, Charles Foster Kane. Yes, the 25-year-old Orson Welles' direction is astounding. Yes, Welles and Herman Mankiewicz's screenplay is a pointed satire of paper baron William Randolph Hearst. Yes, Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography is sumptuous. Yes, Bernard Herrmann's score is eerily ominous.
A slew of queasy 1960s anxieties get refracted through the camp superspy persona of oversexed karate-chopping polymath Derek Flint (James Coburn, fantastically deadpan). Our Man Flint sees him tackle a trio of, gasp, pinko scientists who can control the planet's weather, while In Like Flint pits him against a devious group of demented feminists. Funny, knowing, and yet unsettling at the same time.
Colin (son of Tom) Hanks proves his worth as a responsible wannabe writer constantly thwarted by his manic stoner brother (Jack Black), drunken mum (Catherine O'Hara) and surfer dude buddies. Many most excellent jokes and comic cameos from John Lithgow and Jane Adams make this a fine Friday-nighter.
Not even the presence of Peter Lorre can save Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea from being shoddy, badly written B-movie dreck. Fantastic Voyage may be creaky, but it's still great fun. Gasp as doctors (including Raquel Welch) get miniaturised and injected into the bloodstream of a comatose scientist to operate on his brain. Worth it for the impressively psychedelic SFX alone.
