Day: March 7, 2017

Alex on Film addicts the casual websurfer film fan with incisive analysis of plot holes, behind-the-scenes connections, and other lesser-considered aspects of movies.
His beat encompasses classics as well as genre trash you'd never watch (e.g., the Predator series).
Lately he hit three films I'd seen in the last six months, so the jackpot is... a blog post.

The Lineup (1958). Lesser-known rough gem from the great Don Siegel (see Alex on Film's screenshot above).

Le Samouraï (1967). Agree this is style over substance, and one might add, the ending makes no sense. The police procedural aspects and Inspector Javert-like cop add spice to the tale of a loner who would eventually be better-incarnated as Jim Jarmusch's and Forest Whitaker's Ghost Dog. Lastly, Jean-Pierre Melville isn't really new wave, more like proto-new wave, although this film came at the height of that era.

The Witch (2015). Spoiler: The witch did it.

Also, in a review of Coma, an appreciation of the under-appreciated Geneviève Bujold (who I celebrity-spotted in a NYC bookstore once -- the clerk who was helping her obviously had no idea he was assisting royalty):

Geneviève Bujold . . . well, she could have been a star. As David Thomson puts it, she “is so remarkable in [Coma] that she makes one conscious of how a steady career has neglected her real virtues.” Or per Pauline Kael: “There’s no way to sanitize this actress. She’s like a soft furry animal and she’s irreducibly curious; she snuggles deep inside the shallow material.”

She was in fact a star, Hollywood-career-arc-wise, from King of Hearts through Anne of a Thousand Days through Tightrope, roughly, but let's also recall the auteur types she worked with: Brian De Palma (Obsession), Alan Rudolph (Choose Me), and David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers).