Articles written by Barry M. Grey
Showing 69 Articles
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Golden Globe Awards Nominee - Up in the Air
Director-screenwriter Jason Reitman's funny, smart, knowing tale of modern alienation, Up in the Air, features strong performances from a trio of gifted actors.
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Remember the Night: A Superior Christmas Film
Remember the Night is not the best known of Christmas films. But it's among the finest Hollywood ever produced -- smart, sweet and rivaling far better known holiday fare.
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TCM Special Looks at History of Movie Epics
The Christmas week special is TCM's film-school-for-the-masses overview of a particular genre. In this case, it's epics -- and it's mostly a by-the-numbers affair.
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Oscar Hopeful: (500) Days of Summer
(500) Days of Summer is a charming, smart, idiosyncratic Gen-Y romantic comedy which struggles to stretch the genre's conventions, denying up front it's a love story.
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Film Noir - The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is among the great noirs of the mid-40s, a superb story with all the right ingredients for a cynical postwar audience.
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Scorsese's Raging Bull a Classic Redemption Tale
From the moment it premiered in 1980, you knew Raging Bull was, thematically and visually, a film for the ages -- a rich tapestry of rage, relationships and redemption.
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Carey Mulligan Breaks Through in An Education
Carey Mulligan makes a strong impression in An Education, expertly navigating the perilous love story of a headstrong teenager and a mature man who has much to hide.
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Charles Boyer Was Among Greatest Screen Lovers
On film, debonair Charles Boyer was pure Continental romance and sophistication. But in a bittersweet final act, this quiet Frenchman proved himself a real-life romantic.
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Barbara Stanwyck Among Finest Film Actors Ever
She never won a competitive Oscar, but Barbara Stanwyck remains among Hollywood's most loved and admired film actors, thanks to an astonishingly diverse filmography.
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Forbidden Planet a Groundbreaking Sci-Fi Classic
Forbidden Planet is among the most fondly-remembered space epics of the 1950s. It's a psychological "space western" with all the elements of today's popcorn blockbusters.
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DVD Review: Columbia Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1
This handsome, comprehensive package offers superior special features, including observations by noir experts Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, James Ellroy and Eddie Muller
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Woody Allen's Whatever Works - DVD Review
There's plenty that's funny but way too familiar in this Woody Allen entry -- from the bittersweet screenplay to the performances to the soundtrack's musical standards.
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DVD Review: Life After People, Complete Season 1
One of the best cable specials of 2008 was Life After People. Visually, the follow-up series is equally engaging, but disappoints because it is frustratingly repetitive.
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The Narrow Margin Packs a Wide Wallop
It was supposed to be a simple B-movie, made on the cheap and destined for the bottom of a double bill. But The Narrow Margin turned out to be a taut film noir classic.
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Jean Arthur - A Squeaky Voice For the Ages
A top star of the 1930s and '40s, Jean Arthur was a bundle of contradictions. Shy and self-conscious, she nonetheless crafted a unique persona that charmed audiences.
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Joseph Cotten a Versatile Star of 40s Classics
His name was Cotten. But this Virginian, son of an assistant postmaster, was no lightweight. Joseph Cotten proved himself a versatile actor in 75 movies over 40 years.
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DVD Review - The William Castle Collection
A handsomely-mounted five-disc set offers B-movie fans an excellent sampling of the works of William Castle, the bombastic producer-director often likened to P.T. Barnum.
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Norman Lloyd Reflects on Welles and Chaplin
In Part Two of our interview, the vigorous 94-year-old actor-producer-director recalls Orson Welles and tells a remarkable story about Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
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Norman Lloyd Recalls Storied Work With Hitchcock
Norman Lloyd's remarkable film career has spanned seven decades and included filmmakers from Hitchcock and Chaplin to contemporary directors including Peter Weir.
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Murder, My Sweet Among Best Films Noir
Murder, My Sweet is a masterful early film noir, a brilliant mix of convoluted plot, hard-boiled dialogue, nightmarish atmosphere and comically cynical narration.
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Film Review: Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces
Five Easy Pieces helped mark a sea change in the content, tone and direction of American movies in the transitional, counterculture years of the late 1960s and early 70s.
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William Powell, Myrna Loy Star in The Thin Man
The Thin Man is among the most charming films of the '30s, a savvy mix of detective mystery and light comedy that introduced one of the movies' most endearing couples.
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Movie Review: Swing Time (1936)
Of the seven RKO pictures Astaire and Rogers made together during the '30s, Swing Time often is regarded as their most artful mix of song, dance and romance.
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Movie Review: The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Maltese Falcon marked the auspicious directing debut of John Huston, who also wrote the screenplay and was blessed with an exceptional cast of superb players.
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DVD Review: The Fog of War by Errol Morris
With the death July 6 of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at 93, it seems appropriate to revisit the film that revealed lessons learned and lost in Vietnam.
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DVD Review: Rarely Seen Screwball Comedies
In the second of twin DVD releases, Columbia Pictures revisits four vintage films -- although only three really qualify as screwball comedies; the fourth is a pretender.
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DVD Review: Screwball Comedies Release, Vol. 1
In the first of twin DVD releases, Columbia Pictures revisits four of its lesser comedies featuring two great comic actresses and some often-underrated leading men.
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Old School Comic Stars Featured in DVD Release
Five distinctly different comic styles are showcased in a four-disc set of variety show clips and other TV snippets aimed at an undemanding older audience.
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1939: Hollywood's Best Year Revisited in July
Classic movie fans who own a TV will be salivating shamelessly throughout July, when Turner Classic Movies screens 39 great Hollywood films from the watershed year 1939.
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Movie Review: The Fortune Cookie
The Fortune Cookie is a smart, scabrous, deliciously cynical take on greed in general and, in particular, the litigious society America was becoming in the mid-1960s.
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Elle Fanning in Film Drama On Being Different
Phoebe in Wonderland is the kind of heartfelt, rainy-day, curl-up-in-a-blanket-with-hot-chocolate story that stays with you a long time.
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DVD Review – The Hunger: The Complete 1st Season
This lackluster series, an erotic Twilight Zone-style anthology, remains a failure and mostly seems an exercise in masturbatory television for the undemanding.
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DVD Review - Dominick Dunne, After the Party
This superior film does a nice job of recounting the rocky life story of a latter-day practitioner of what used to be called New Journalism.
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Marx Bros. Duck Soup Arguably Their Best Film
Duck Soup - the fifth and best of the Marx Brothers' movies - is their funniest and fastest film, a multi-faceted farce that plays as razor-sharp today as it did in 1933.
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September Affair a Radical Romance for 1950
September Affair poses an intriguing premise: what if you could start fresh, with a passionate new love, in a dazzling place and with no financial worries?
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A Night at the Opera: Marx Brothers Movie Review
Consistently over-praised, this was the team's first film at highbrow MGM and it shows - with the usual winning Marx formula watered down by a meddling studio.
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DVD Review: Forbidden Hwd. Vol. 3 - Bonus Items
In the final installment of our look at Turner Classic Movies' Forbidden Hollywood, Vol, 3, we survey special features in the four-disc tribute to William Wellman.
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DVD Review: Forbidden Hwd., Vol. 3's Best Films
Turner Classic Movies' Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 3 is devoted to early sound films of William Wellman -- and the final three of six features are the cream of the box set.
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DVD Review: TCM's Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 3
Volume 3 of Turner Classic Movies' Forbidden Hollywood series features early talkies by a master filmmaker whose career extended from the silent era to the late 1950s
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DVD Review: The Last Word, Starring Wes Bentley
An art house romantic comedy without portfolio, The Last Word features a breakout performance by Winona Ryder and fine work from, of all people, Ray Romano.
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Nickelodeon/The Last Picture Show DVD Release
A new two-DVD set from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment pairs what is arguably director Peter Bogdanovich's best film with one of his weaker efforts.
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Angels With Dirty Faces Movie (1938)
A key Warner Bros. picture of the period, Angels features real-life best friends James Cagney and Pat O'Brien as lifelong pals who take different forks in life's road.
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Spinning into Butter Movie
Spinning into Butter plays like a Lifetime cable movie - insufferably earnest, obvious and aimless, and wastes the talents of at least three gifted performers.
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Once Upon a Time in America Movie (1984)
A powerful, unorthodox meditation on friendship, loyalty and betrayal, the film follows boyhood pals who bond over street crime and graduate to felonious adulthoods.
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Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)
The original Goodbye, Mr. Chips is the slow, sentimental, stiff-upper-lip British tale that has long been the template for movies about teachers who make a difference.
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Here Comes Mr. Jordan
This 1941 classic is among the most romantic films of Hollywood's Golden Era, a fantasy perhaps hokey by today's standards, yet charming, heartwarming and funny as hell.
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The Devil and Miss Jones Movie
Comedy and union activism collide in this Jean Arthur vehicle about class struggle within the walls of a big New York City department store.
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Sullivan's Travels: An Appreciation
Sullivan's Travels remains as fresh as ever, mixing its director's schizophrenic mastery of language and sight gag, comedy and drama, whimsy and deeply felt values.
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Review: King Vidor's The Crowd (1928)
The Crowd may be the greatest American film you've never seen. A time capsule of the Twenties, it boasts an unapologetic social conscience and a dazzling style.
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Jean Harlow Stars in Capra's Platinum Blonde
An early talkie, the episodic Platinum Blonde today is mostly a curio worth seeing for its eponymous star, whose look and sexy style set the standard for movie blondes.
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Eyes Without a Face Movie Review
An eerie 1960 fantasy, Eyes Without a Face is especially intriguing because, a half-century later, its fictional medical science is now science fact.
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Freaks Among Greatest of All Cult Classics
Tragically deformed outcasts star in this absorbing pre-Code B-movie that does more to promote tolerance than any of Hollywood's preachy "message" pictures.
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DiCaprio and Winslet in Revolutionary Road
Eleven years after their ship went down in the North Atlantic, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are afloat onscreen again -- in a searing marital drama.
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Daniel Craig Stars in Defiance
The movies' current James Bond, Daniel Craig, brings a similar steely intensity to the story of Jewish refugees who must fight to survive invading Nazis.
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Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box
A great European film of the 1920s, Pandora's Box stars the American actor whose personal tragedy mirrors that of her iconic character, a sexually adventurous innocent.
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The Enchanted Cottage Movie (1945)
This charming, earnest tale relies not on special effects but purely on the skills of its stars for a modern take on the adage, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
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Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees
For decades, Pride of the Yankees was the template for sports movie biographies - a perfect blend of casting, story, script and performance.
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Angelina Jolie in Changeling
A superb true crime story, Changeling leads audiences on a tour of Los Angeles at the end of the Roaring Twenties that is both exhilarating and horrifying.
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Movie: Portrait of Jennie (1948)
Portrait of Jennie is irresistible movie hokum: a heartfelt supernatural take on the transcendence of love which begs viewers to forgive obvious shortcomings.
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Cult Movie: Daughters of Darkness
Daughters of Darkness is an exceptionally stylish, smart and erotic horror film that carves its own niche in the sub-genre of lesbian vampire movies.
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Movie: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
This taut, lean tale of an alien invasion is an allegory proclaiming the dehumanizing effect of Communism - and the virtue of American individuality.
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Romance: The Purple Rose of Cairo
Woody Allen's love of nostalgia and philosophy dovetail perfectly in a study of real life vs. reel life that is among the funniest, most satisfying films of his career.
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Film Noir: D.O.A.
D.O.A. is rightfully regarded as a landmark film because of an intriguing premise: the hero tells us right up front he must solve his own murder - before he drops dead.
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Cult Movie: Harold and Maude (1971)
One of the great cult films of the 1970s, Harold and Maude blends an outrageous conceit with a biting anti-establishment satire, tender sweetness and irreverent humor.
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Dennis Hopper in Night Tide (1960)
Dennis Hopper's first lead film role comes in this quirky, supernatural mermaid tale, one which expertly blurs the line between the mundane and the surreal.
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Movie: The Lathe of Heaven (1980)
The Lathe of Heaven could be called Whole Lotta Futures. Based on a superb 1971 science fiction novel, this 1980 adaptation ably captures an intriguing premise.
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Film Noir: In a Lonely Place (1950)
Movie star Humphrey Bogart was a serious actor - and set out to prove just that in 1950's excellent film noir In a Lonely Place. To do so, he cast himself against type.
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Movie: Gun Crazy (1949)
Few B-movies are as admired for their pacing and prescience as 1949's Gun Crazy, which equated guns with sex and directly inspired a classic American film 18 years later.
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History is Made at Night (1937)
History is Made at Night is the kind of romantic melodrama Hollywood pretty much patented in the years between the advent of sound and America's entry into World War II.
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