dvr this Turner Classic Movies, 8:15 p.m., May 18 I don’t think Murder by Death is as good as the similarly themed Clue – both of them are parodies of the 1970s Agatha Christie murder mysteries – but it is still great fun. Written by Neil Simon, the film’s conceit is that a rich madman…
dvr this Turner Classic Movies, Sunday, April 21, 1 a.m. While the musical Hair is a beloved classic, there is an unspoken problem with the staged version. It doesn’t really have much of a plot. The movie, on the other hand, which was directed by the great Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,…
dvr this: HBO, Sunday, April 7, 9 p.m. It’s back! HBO’s stupendous orgy of sex, violence and beards returned for its third season March 31, and for three months, we’ll have Sunday nights full of swords, sorcery, intrigue and dragons. While the show occasionally feels exploitative (tits, again?), it is also so well acted, so…
dvr this Turner Classic Movies, 10:45 p.m., Saturday, March 23 Luc Besson became world famous with the great thriller La Femme Nikita, in which a teenage junkie (Anne Parillaud) agrees to become an assassin in order to avoid going to jail for murder. She’s not happy at first and it’s not easy. She is put…
dvr this Turner Classic Movies, 2:45 p.m., Saturday, March 2 TCM is finishing off their annual 31 Days of Oscar, and March 2, they’re playing one of the great underwatched gems of the ‘60s, The Apartment. It stars Jack Lemmon as a milquetoast corporate drone who is forced to loan out his pad to his…
dvr this Turner Classic Movies, 5 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 24 For some insane reason, Dustin Hoffman didn’t win an Oscar for playing Michael Dorsey, a struggling actor who impersonates a woman in order to get a role on a soap opera. The woman he impersonates, Dorothy Michaels, is an uptight, middle-aged redhead who becomes a…
dvr this Turner Classic Movies, Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2:30 a.m. Alan Parker’s searing, gritty, and brilliant musical about New York’s School of the Arts is everything Glee is not: believable, moving and full of original songs. Starring Irene Cara as the ambitious singing and dancing Coco; Debbie Allen as the school’s charismatic dance teacher and…
dvr this The only person who Hitchcock directed to an Oscar, Joan Fontaine, is wonderfully terrified as a meek heiress who marries a mysterious playboy played with devilish creepiness by Cary Grant at his best. Suspicion is one of Hitchcock’s great suspense melodramas of the 1940s, and it holds up nearly 70 years later, engrossing…
dvr this Turner Classic Movies Monday, Feb. 4, 5 p.m. Arthur Penn’s hyper-violent-for-1967 film about the legendary outlaws was wildly influential and it turned Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway into superstars. You can see the film in the work of Quentin Tarentino, Oliver Stone and Andrew Dominik, among others. Film history aside, it’s also entertaining….
dvr this Turner Classic Movies 2:15 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 22 One of my favorite movies, Rebecca is romantic, creepy, thrilling and among the most beautifully shot films ever made. It is based on the Daphne du Maurier novel about a young woman who marries a widower and is haunted by his past, his housekeeper and…
