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The release of a new James Bond film is always a cause for celebration. I’ve been following Bond since I was six or seven years old, but the series is even older than I am. Isn’t it remarkable that the same family has been making these films now for sixty years? There is nothing quite like the Bond phenomenon.

The release of No Time to Die was held up for more than a year due to the Chinese coronavirus, but now it is shaping up to be by far the most successful post-pandemic cinematic release. (more…)

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No Time to Die is an excellent Bond film. It belongs in the company of Casino Royale and Skyfall and quite self-consciously reaches for the heights of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which is arguably the best Bond film ever.

I was especially looking forward to No Time to Die because — although it is very much a minority opinion — my favorite Bond actor is Daniel Craig. (more…)

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The Pit
Directed by Lew Lehman
Written by Ian A. Stuart (original screenplay; it’s complicated)
Stars [sic]: Sammy Snyders, Jeannie Elias, Sonja Smits
Canada (it’s complicated), 1981, 1 hour & 36 minutes

“We took your fantastic script and produced a piece of Grade B garbage. Sorry.”[1] (more…)

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When I first saw Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), it struck me as a remake of Doctor Zhivago. Both narratives begin in glamorous and archaic empires that fall to Communist revolutions. Of course, that could just be due to the fact that the Chinese Revolution was something of a remake of the Russian Revolution. But there are parallels specific to the two films, both of which depict Communism as recapitulating the old forms of despotism but as vulgar and brutal farces, stripped of all refinement. (more…)

Anatoly Solonitsyn as Writer in Stalker.

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Every musician that Shostakovich was at the Moscow Conservatory with in one particular year was shot. Every one, on Stalin’s orders. And when he asked . . . why he’d been spared, Stalin said, “Shostakovich can write film music. We need film music. Because we need film. (more…)

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Dawson City: Frozen Time is an extraordinary documentary about the 1978 Dawson Film Find, the unlikely tale of when hundreds of hitherto missing and presumed lost silent films and newsreels were rediscovered buried under a swimming pool in Dawson City, a microscopic town of 1,375 people in the Canadian Yukon, 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle. You can watch it here. (more…)

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David Lean’s epic anti-Communist romance Doctor Zhivago (1965) is a great and serious work of art. Doctor Zhivago was initially panned by the critics — probably not because it is a bad film, but because it was very bad for Communism. Nevertheless, it was immensely popular. It is still one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, adjusted for inflation. It also won five Oscars — for Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Bolt), Best Original Score (Maurice Jarre), Best Cinematography (Freddie Young), Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design. (more…)

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Bread and Chocolate, a 1974 Italian film written and directed by Franco Brusati and starring Nino Manfredi, came when immigration was heating up in America. It reminded me of my own experience of the 1970s, when I was stationed in Germany and seeing foreign “guest workers” doing scut work everywhere, from restaurant help to loading trucks. In front of my barracks every morning, a doleful squad of Turks hopped off a truck to collect good, clean, municipal German trash while a burly German in a truck waited for them to do the drag and hassle before driving on. (more…)

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Brad Bird is the director of three classic animated films: The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles (2004), and Ratatouille (2007), as well as the blockbuster sequel The Incredibles 2 (2018). The Incredibles is a superhero film that also pays affectionate homage to the spy movies of the 1960s, especially classic Bond. (more…)

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H. G. Wells is best known for being one of the founding fathers of science fiction, along with his French counterpart Jules Verne. While he was a wordsmith by trade, he had a strong influence on the medium of film almost from the beginning. (more…)

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Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes (1948) is his greatest work and one of my all-time favorite films. The Red Shoes is a work of art about art. Its central characters are ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (brilliantly played by Anton Walbrook), ballerina Victoria Page (acted and danced by Moira Shearer), and composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring, who was much too old for the role and looks ridiculous smoking a cigarette but is otherwise adequate). (more…)

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English original here

Strážci (Watchmen) patří k těm nejpravicovějším – dokonce s fašismem flirtujícím – dílům popkultury posledních let, a to vše i navzdory řádně a plně v souladu s duchem doby levicovému smýšlení tvůrců původního komiksu: autora příběhu Alana Moorea, ilustrátora Davea Gibbonse i Zacka Snydera, autora filmové adaptace, již osobně považuji za ten vůbec nejlepší snímek o superhrdinech, který své předloze nejen že dělá čest, ale dokonce ji v mnoha důležitých ohledech vylepšuje. (more…)

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Reds is a movie that I was badly wanting not to like. This 1981 historical epic about the life of degenerate American journalist and Communist activist John Reed (played by Warren Beatty) and his equally degenerate journalist wife Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) is definitely pro-Communist. Additionally, I have always found Reds’ writer/director/producer/star Warren Beatty to be a rather distasteful character in his own right. And yet I can’t deny that much of Reds is objectively excellent. It is wonderfully written, directed, casted, performed, and shot. Whatever I may feel about the characters or its message, the whole film is just so well executed that I have no choice but to enjoy it in spite of everything. (more…)

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“The Day After, ABC‘s much-discussed vision of nuclear Armageddon, is no longer only a television film, of course; it has become an event, a rally and a controversy, much of it orchestrated.”
— The New York Times, November 20, 1983

I have a somewhat morbid fascination with nuclear war. It is one of the absolute worst and unimaginably nightmarish things that could theoretically happen. When you step back and think about the bullet that the human race dodged during the Cold War, it is truly mind-blowing. (more…)

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Virginia Woolf said that a writer needed two essential things: guineas and locks –that is, money and privacy. June Leigh (Naomi Watts), the protagonist of The Wolf Hour, has enough of these, and like Garbo, she wants to be alone. However, her door buzzer keeps ringing and no one answers on the other end. It’s almost a Greek chorus of defiance, a spiritual raspberry to June’s pretensions, for she is the author of The Patriarch, a searing novel that established her career as a writer and has caused a split with her family so bad that they’ve disowned her. (more…)

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Dr. Sidney Schafer (James Coburn) is a therapist at the top of his game. He’s clever, probing, a master of his profession, and James Coburn gives his character a smirk of pride while his eyes probe his patients in this 1967 satire. His office is very sixties, abounding in modern art and decor, and set on a table is a Chinese gong. Why a gong? Memories of foreign travel? A way to summon the Emperor or expel demons? Schafer is, after all, an emperor of therapy. (more…)

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One of my all-time favorite movies is The Red Shoes, Michael Powell’s 1948 Technicolor feast about a ballet impresario played by the great Anton Walbrook and his ecstatic, obsessive, and ultimately destructive relationship with his art—and one artist in particular. So you can imagine how eagerly I sought out Powell’s first foray into Technicolor, 1943’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, also starring Walbrook. (more…)

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That’s right. I’m going to Greece for the sex. Sex for breakfast, sex for dinner, sex for tea, and sex for supper.

Sounds like a marvelous diet, love.

Yes, if you haven’t heard of it, it’s called the F plan.

It’s summertime, and many of us are flocking to various bodies of water for swimming, beachgoing, and respite from the humdrum of everyday life, so it might be a good time to have a look at one of the United Kingdom’s best films, the 1989 romantic comedy Shirley Valentine. (more…)

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Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) was one of the giants of Japanese letters as well as an outspoken Right-wing nationalist. Mishima shocked the world on November 25, 1970, when he and members of his private militia, the Tatenokai or Shield Society, took hostage the commander of the Japan Self-Defense Force’s Ichigaya Camp. Mishima then delivered a speech to the assembled soldiers and press, exhorting the Japanese to turn away from American-imposed consumerism back to their traditional aristocratic culture, which prized honor above life and comfort. (more…)

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Today, we will be looking at some anti-communist propaganda from deep in the heart of the McCarthy era when the second Red Scare was at its zenith. This is some hardcore time capsule stuff, folks. (more…)

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How the West Was Won (1962)
Starring: James Stewart, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, and others
Directed by: John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall
Written by: James R. Webb & John Gay (uncredited)

Want to watch a wholesome pro-white move? A movie that is a classic of artistic excellence? I offer up the 1962 epic, How the West Was Won.

It must be stated upfront that the movie is a masterpiece with a flaw. How the West Was Won was filmed and presented using the Cinerama process. (more…)

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Trevor Lynch can wax eloquent over Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge Over the River Kwai, but when I choose a great movie hero from that era, forget Lawrence or Lt. Colonel Nicholson; my man is Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) in Robert Wise’s 1966 The Sand Pebbles, an epic action film examining a common man whose performance by Steve McQueen is an excellent depiction of a true, common, American.

Jake Holman is in the China of 1926, a machinist’s mate assigned to the San Pablo, a gunboat on duty in the backwaters. (more…)

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When I was in college, the campus offered a film series called Twice-Told Tales. You would view a film followed by its remake three days later. Films like Dangerous Female (1931), starring the well-known actor Ricardo Cortez. Whatever happened to Ricardo Cortez? For that matter, Dangerous Female? The remake did rather better: The Maltese Falcon (1942), starring Humphrey Bogart. We sure know him. (more…)

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David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is not just a great film, it is a nearly perfect one. Even better, it was recognized as such from the start by virtually everyone. The critics lionized it and continue to include it on their “best” lists. The movie business showered it with prizes. Bridge won seven Oscars, including best picture and best director. Audiences made it the biggest film of 1957 and a perennial favorite ever since. (more…)

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Do not believe the poster of this 1952 film. Do not. Wait ‘Till the Sun Shines, Nellie, isn’t the pleasant, bubbly, Technicolor singfest that is promised, although the song with all its nostalgic sentiment is there. Its appearances, however, evoke sadness and regret, much like old family photos tend to.

The action begins in the 1890s aboard a train chugging to Chicago, carrying Ben Harper (David Wayne) and Nellie (Jean Peters). (more…)

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On a Sunday last May, while Minneapolis burned, my Yankee sweetheart and I indulged in a double helping of nostalgia. The engine that propelled us along this journey down memory lane was Blast from the Past, an American romantic comedy, now a little more than twenty years old, that celebrated the morals, manners, and milieux of an even earlier time and place, the America sacrificed on the altar of equality of opportunity in the annus mirabilis of 1965. (more…)

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Not every Merchant-Ivory film is a visually lush period drama based on novels by prestigious writers like E. M. Forster and Henry James, but the most memorable ones are, including The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987), and Howards End (1992). Another in this vein is The Remains of the Day (1993), based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.  (more…)

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When the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli received an anonymous solution to a difficult problem he’d set in 1696, he saw at once who had sent it. The solver was Isaac Newton, he said, because he knew ex ungue leonem — “the lion by his claw.” (more…)

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Christian Petzold’s Undine, set in contemporary Berlin, begins with Undine Wibeau (Paula Beer) having coffee with Johannes, her boyfriend. It’s not going well. She has deep, penetrating eyes and red hair that looks ready to blaze. She says to him: “You said you loved me. Forever. If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you. You know that.”

We’ve all had girlfriends like that, haven’t we? (more…)

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Did you know that whites invented homosexuality, transgenderism, rape, lesbianism, feminism, and all other forms of perversion? Neither did I, but my eyes have been opened by the insightful new documentary film Buck Breaking, produced by Tariq Nasheed. It’s the story of how white supremacy sexually objectifies the black man to break his masculine spirit and dominate him. (more…)