The 1980 box-office bomb takes place on an experimental research station on a moon of the title’s ringed planet. For three years, scientist Adam (ol’ butt-chinned Kirk Douglas) has worked there to solve Earth’s hunger problem hydroponically, alongside Alex (Farrah Fawcett, The Cannonball Run), his much younger partner — in the lab and the space-disco […]
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Room 237
Only the first of these is true. Just don’t tell the unseen interviewees of Room 237, Rodney Ascher’s extraordinary documentary about all the crazy conspiracy theories surrounding Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic, The Shining. You’ve heard about The Shining, right? It’s the film that Kubrick loaded with subliminal messages and made synchronic when simultaneously played forward […]
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Berberian Sound Studio
Berberian Sound Studio isn’t directed by Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, but it may as well be. His influence is draped lovingly all over the British film: • A projectionist seen only by his hands dons black gloves — the requisite accessory for many a murderer in the director’s giallo efforts. • The movie within […]
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Jack the Giant Slayer
The film’s fatal mistake? Perhaps it was director Bryan Singer embracing the 19th-century nature of the story as tightly as he did Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie for his own Superman Returns. These days, to satisfy family audiences, it’s evidently not enough to revive an old-fashioned tale; you have to hip it up with nods […]
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The Company You Keep
The Company You Keep, which opens Friday at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, 2501 W. Memorial, is boomer meditation disguised as political drama. Directed by and starring Robert Redford, it pretends to be ambivalent about the 1960s counterculture, but the reverence of the treatment suggests otherwise. Last seen onscreen in 2007’s Lions for Lambs, Redford […]
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Neiman seed
Stanley Marcus’ Self-Portrait at a Flea Market, March 1966, Paris, France People likely know Stanley Marcus as the trailblazing former president of high-end retailer Neiman Marcus, not an accomplished photographer. His granddaughter, Allison V. Smith, fully understands. “He always had a camera with him, but he never really shared his images,” she said. “Maybe he […]
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Perry Mason Mysteries: The Original Warner Bros. Movies Collection
But curiosity is curiosity, and interest is interest, so when Warner Archive issued an MOD DVD set of them in Perry Mason Mysteries: The Original Warner Bros. Movies Collection, I just had to check it out, your honor. Warren William (who also played another famous detective, Philo Vance, for the big screen) stars as the […]
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Zorro
Zorro movies always are better in theory than execution, but this is one of the more enjoyable efforts, because for once, the swashbuckling Spanish superhero is interpreted by the Italians. Therefore, the dish has a slight spaghetti-Western flavor. French screen idol Alain Delon (Le Samouraï) gallops into town as Don Diego, only to see his […]
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Full Metal Jacket: 25th Anniversary Blu-ray Book
Time has a way of restoring balance, however. Platoon’s reputation has decreased along with that of its irascible director, and when’s the last time you heard anyone talk about The Last Emperor? If ever? Meanwhile, love for Full Metal Jacket continues to pile up, and the war epic currently stands tall at No. 81 on […]
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Soul music
Soul on Fire2 and 7 p.m. Thursday Douglass Theatre 900 N. Martin Luther King 517-4176 $20 Musical theater is often seen as a monolithic world of jazz hands and non-threatening gangsters in flamboyant zoot suits. But there are musicals that use the genre to tackle more substantial themes, whether it’s sexual identity in “Hedwig and […]