Oct 23 1998 PLEASANTVILLE opens. Dir. Gary Ross. One of the year's most original & entertaining fantasy comedies with Toby McGuire & Reese Witherspoon as a couple of 1998 siblings who are suddenly transported into the sanitized B & W world of the titular 1950s sitcom. Great fun.
Oct 23 1998 SOLDIER opens. Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson. On a dystopian planet, a former career soldier defends a local human community from annihilation by his former Earth-based, cybernetically enhanced comrades. Kurt Russell anchors formulaic but solidly crafted sci-fi thriller.
Oct 23 1970 NO BLADE OF GRASS opens. Dir. Cornel Wilde. After a plague devastates the world's crops, Brit family undertakes desperate trek north across lawless, dystopian wasteland. Coarse, violent, clumsily assembled, exploitative adapt. of classic novel. With Nigel Davenport.
Oct 23 1968 ICE STATION ZEBRA opens in LA Cinerama Dome. Dir. John Sturges. US & Soviet subs race to recover crashed spy satellite from beneath the Arctic ice. Expansive, lumbering albeit visually arresting Cold War thriller. Rock Hudson & Patrick McGoohan lead all male cast.
Oct 22 2004 SIDEWAYS opens. Dir. Alexander Payne. Two old friends - a sad sack, divorced teacher & a garrulous, about to be married actor - take a soul-searching trip thru CA wine country in a wonderfully disarming, quietly bittersweet comedy of midlife crisis & male friendship.
Oct 22 1982 FIRST BLOOD opens. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. Stallone's first Rambo outing remains the jewel in the franchise's subsequently much blighted crown; an exemplary, high octane action vehicle with a feral, psychological undertow. Solid support from Brian Dennehy & Richard Crenna.
Oct 22 1971 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW opens. Dir. Peter Bogdanovich's masterful adapt. of Larry McMurtry's evocative time capsule from 1951 charting 2 HS buddies' sexual awakening/coming of age in an economically desolate dead end Texas backwater. With Jeff Bridges & Timothy Bottoms.
Oct 21 2005 KISS KISS BANG BANG opens. Dir. Shane Black. Deliriously plotted, self reverential, 4th wall breaking, LA-set noir comedy thriller with Robert Downey Jr's voluble petty thief & Val Kilmer's gay PI accentuating the bullets & bodies mayhem with witty, quippy badinage.
Oct 21 1983 THE RIGHT STUFF opens. Dir. Philip Kaufman. Epic historical drama documenting US space program beginning with the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947 thru to the training of Mercury 7 astronauts some 20 years later. Film is commercial failure but critical success.
Oct 21 1993 THE DEAD ZONE opens. Dir. David Cronenberg. Superior adapt. of profoundly creepy Stephen King story with excellent Christopher Walken as teacher who comes out of 5 year coma possessing precognitive psychic powers allowing him to see into a person's past & future.
Oct 21 1964 MY FAIR LADY prem. in NY. Dir. George Cukor. Rex Harrison & Audrey Hepburn headline lavish adapt. of Lerner & Loewe's storied hit 1956 B'way musical (itself culled from Shaw's Pygmalion). Box-office blockbuster wins 8 Oscars including Picture, Actor & Director.
Oct 21 1983 ALL THE RIGHT MOVES opens. Dir. Michael Chapman. Familiar, well made sports themed drama with a young Tom Cruise as hungry HS football star who sets his sights on sports scholarship that will meal ticket him out of dead-end, working class PA mill town.
Oct 21 1970 LITTLE FAUSS AND BIG HALSY opens. Dir.Sidney J. Furie. Meandering, little seen curio feat. Robert Redford as itinerant, skirt-chasing dirt bike racer & cherubic Michael J Pollard as his feckless sidekick/mechanic. With Lauren Hutton. Music by Johnny Cash & Bob Dylan.
Oct 20 2006 THE PRESTIGE opens. Dir. Christopher Nolan. In Victorian London 2 stage magicians consumed with fanatical rivalry, jostle deceitfully to perfect a Tesla designed transportation illusion. Hugh Jackman & Christian Bale negotiate the parlor game's smoke & mirrors.
Oct 20 2000 BEDAZZLED opens. Dir. Harold Ramis. Fun, frivolous, gender-flipping remake of Peter Cook & Dudley Moore's witty & subversive 1967 original. Elizabeth Hurley as a seductive Satan who offers Brendan Fraser's Faustian computer geek 7 wishes in exchange for his soul.
Oct 20 1995 GET SHORTY opens. Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. Witty, sharply satirical adapt. of Elmore Leonard novel with John Travolta as coolly insouciant Miami loan shark/gangster who takes a shine to the movie business while on a debt-collecting sojourn in LA. With Gene Hackman.
Oct 19 1990 REVERSAL OF FORTUNE opens. Dir. Barbet Schroeder. A sensational Jeremy Irons earns his Oscar in an endlessly fascinating dramatization of the media-frenzied criminal trials (1980-82) of Claus von Bulow, a socialite charged with 2 attempted murders of his wealthy wife.
Oct 19 2001 THE LAST CASTLE opens. Dir. Rod Lurie. Robert Redford waves the flag as court martialed former general who is co-opted by his fellow inmates to lead a bloody revolt against military prison's sadistic, authoritarian warden. With an on hiatus Soprano James Gandolfini.
Oct 19 1979 AND JUSTICE FOR ALL opens. Dir. Norman Jewson. Al Pacino dials up the courtroom theatrics as idealistic defense attorney waging a frustrating, losing battle against the inherent iniquities of the US justice system. Engaging legal drama spiked with satiric impulses.
Oct 19 1973 CHARLIE VARRICK opens. Dir. Don Siegel. Eccentric, violence etched crime caper classic with a wonderful Walter Matthau as resourceful crop duster pilot/part-time bank robber whose unwitting heist of a Mafia payroll puts him on a wily hitman's most wanted list.
Oct 18 2013 12 YEARS A SLAVE opens in NY. Dir. Steve McQueen. In 1841 in NYC a free cultured black man is kidnapped & sold into 12 years of brutal slavery at Louisiana plantation. Harrowing, soul-piercing true story with remarkable Chiwetel Ejiofor leading outstanding ensemble.
Oct 18 2002 AUTO FOCUS opens. Paul Schrader. Grisly biopic tracing Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane's sexual obsessed journey from TV stardom to penny ante dinner theater & finally brutal (unsolved) murder at cheap Ariz. motel. A creepy Willem Dafoe as friend & one time suspect.
Oct 18 1974 PHASE IV opens in NY. Saul Bass's sole dir. gig. In Ariz. desert research lab scientists Michael Murphy & Nigel Davenport come under siege by army of ants endowed with cross species intelligence after exposure to cosmic radiation. Creepy, visually trippy sci-fi gem.
Oct 18 1974 AIRPORT '75 opens. Dir. Jack Smight. Trashily entertaining first sequel to 1970 original ratchets up the disaster meter with Charlton Heston & Karen Black leading the mid-air heroics aboard stricken 747. Obligatory B-list cameo cast fills out the passenger list.
Oct 17 2014 FURY opens. Dir. David Ayer. Battle-hardened US tank commander & veteran ragtag crew confront capitulating German army in dying days of WWII. Brad Pitt vividly anchors grim, nihilistic, mud & blood "war is hell" portrait recalling some of the genre's past classics.
