Though the whole thing seems a tad underplotted (they stretch the premise quite thin, to be honest), the general comedy, footed mostly through the big two Sturges staples - Dialogue and goofball personalities - is often laugh out loud funny and, invariably, just pleasing to listen to. Eddie Bracken's grand, over-the-top performance is the glue that holds the whole thing together. Hail the Conquering Hero is meant to be satirically oversized and, like the best of Sturges' films, seems almost categorically fresh when viewed today.

It's a pop explosion, to be sure, but I still have all the same problems with it biting off far more than it can chew and the general sense that this saga is equal parts epic rendering of comic book sensibilities and primetime soap opera.

A terrific mix of situational comedy and slapstick, dragging early on, but picking up speed when the Medicine Show comes to town and Lloyd has to pretend he's the sheriff. Though it may look a tad absurd, I find it pretty hilarious that most of the title character's difficulty comes from his two older siblings chasing him around. The best scene finds the brothers believing they are wooing Lloyd's girl but are, in fact, wooing Lloyd. (Although the long chase between the robber and our hero on a derelict ship adrift in the harbor is a close second.)

A wonderfully convoluted detective story that sparkles with the brilliant comic timing of William Powell and Myrna Loy and plays wonderfully in this era: Nick is a nutty drunk who just happens to be a great detective and Nora is pretty much the most attractive actress every to grace the screen. It's great fun, especially at the edges: The nutty, psych major brother of the protagonist, the absent-minded inventor, the dinner party with all the suspects - - - let's pray they never re-make it.

It retreads its predecessor's territory so thoroughly, you can start to see wear in the carpet. Nick seems an even more unapologetic alcoholic here (slowly veering towards a more tastefully behaved W.C. Fields), while Nora gets less and less funny as the film goes on. They don't leave their personas on the sidelines, per say - - but they don't exactly got to extremes to preserve the same level of camaraderie and symbiotic joke-bouncing present in Van Dyke's original imagining of Dashiell Hammett's gumshoe. Lots of great bit players run around, filling in the various hoods and (in this case) family members of the husband and wife sleuths. Jimmy Stewart, as he once acknowledged, is just downright silly in the part of David. More on that for those who have seen it.

Bringing to the table a positively economic rendering of what feels like the natural, visual representation of an essay, Wilkerson dissects the deeply disturbing totalatarian/corporate ownership of Butte, Montana throughout the last century as a mining industry stripped and abandoned the town as well as the enviornment. It's that special brand of documentary that repeatedly elicits a shocked faux-denial. And at gut level it's also, like Bus 174 and Capturing the Friedmans, forcefully devastating.

One of the most horribly tasteless films I've ever seen. (I may come back to this with more specifics but, to be honest, I'm all but embarrassed that I've seen it.)

In re-reading my original review, I found expressed a great deal more passion than I feel about this lengthier version (to be fair to myself, I think some of that jubilance was always sort of fabricated - - or at the very least, induced by the maassive build of equally manufactured suspense and holiday awards fever). Since I don't downgrade without seeing again (a practice I'm trying harder and harder to abolish), I'd likely have assigned a similiar mark had I seen it in a more sober, hype-less atmosphere (methinks). Much like its protagonist, it carries the greatest of the three burdens: It has so much exposition to divy, so much ground to cover, so much of the tiresome nerd lit to get out of its system, it only really seems to get started around reel (gulp) four (Yes, that's right reel four; For being one-third of a larger piece, it's still quite a sprawling epic unto itself). Scenes unto themselves are a much less exciting treat than the magic of pace improvement and general rhythm exuded from Fellowship's Extended Version. Less noticeable in Return of the King (especially in this Extended Version), is the push to render realistic so much of the thing (as if there were more than concept art lying around to compare it to), a byproduct that dilutes the fantasy - to an extent - in all three films. Also at the mercy of its somewhat awkward position as gasp-for-air narrator of the bunch is this one's performances (save for McKellan), which suffer from being spread so evenly (despite the gangbusters this technique worked in The Two Towers). Actors are mostly saddled with speeches, battle sequences soak up at least a quarter of the film and, aside from watching the tail end of Frodo and Sam's transforming relationship (most of the transforming took place, for me anyhow, in The Two Towers), nobody gains much speed characterwise.  By close, I'm powerless to avoid anticipatory pangs of an only alluded to (by McKellan, at that) super-CGI rendering of The Hobbit (pangs made even more vivid as I've actually bothered to read the tale of There and Back Again).

Second viewing can only provide a chance to admire the artistry of it - the cinematography, the music, the general oddity of behavior - but allows us a watered down version of the surprises and thrills. If you haven't seen it: Do so. It works so beautifully the first time (as long as you're not one of those people hell bent on predicting or pretending to have predicted surprises).

More bizarre - and twistier - than After the Thin Man, but scarcely holds a candle to the spartan The Thin Man.

It's all very entertaining - these actors spawned a billion copycat riffs on this formula - but mostly, the message of guilt and regret over quashing idealism with success made me feel sad. It seems poised to date everything about itself but the ideas, making it seem almost duplicitious and suspicious. (Of course, the "dating", as I call it, is twofold: It's dated because it clearly and unequivocably takes place in the 1980s, but it's also probably dated to a certain generation - be it a universal one, or a more specific one - and doesn't allow for the same connection with those outside its range.)

Heartbreaking in spots - particularly the Vietnamese father recounting an explosion that wiped his family out - and enlightened, with great foresight, in other spots; Daniel Ellsburg's breakdown over RFK's murder as well as a stiff advisor's shocked hope to sidestep what he feels is an obvious question that's not worth asking ("Why are we in Vietnam?") are great, frozen-in-time highlights. The topicality of compare-contrast with a recently freed P.O.W. from New Jersey and just about every cripple Davis could round up seems a bit obvious and winds up nudging us in the ribs instead of portraying how infinite the positions on the war really are.

The brazen insistence that what is portrayed in the following events is poised to resemble real life (a title card before the film reads), perfectly jump starts the saga of corruption that follows: A sometimes powerful, sometimes potent piece of agitprop mise-en-scene detailing the unraveling investigation of a blatant cover-up in which the murder of a senator (and presidential hopeful) shifts paradigms from helpless crime to empowerment through martyrdom to, finally, the empowerment of the powers that be. The cubist trappings of the whole thing have been mined by so many directors it would be hard to fit them all on this page.

The coal miner's songs, left to flesh out this already compact little piece, seem to leave a residue that's both meditative and, partially, counterpoint to the actual meat of the thing: While the documentary proper focuses on the actions of the IWW vs. Anaconda (in copperpot Butte, MT), the actual humanity of the coal miners is left to its own devices. The simplicity of the songs - and their presentation (a la what looks, at first glance, like the interludes that run on The Sundance Channel) - leads us to mix their relatively childlikke spareness with the general message of the piece, which is, itself, layered in the complexity of Socialism's failed intentions, Big Government's protection of business interests at the cost of representing true and honest history and the vile revenge our ass-raped environment naturally unleashes. Somehow, though so little is known of him, Frank Little's fallen shadow seems larger than any of these things, the film keeps insisting, as it recounts his tragic final weeks using mostly accounts tainted by company papers and spotty sourcework. The power of it seems impossible to sidestep. Both times I've viewed it, I've been reduced to emotions I can scarcely describe (anger and sadness seem tame).

Has a great, subconscious thing going for it in the sourcework, namely Elmore Leanord's ripe-for-film pulp disposability (something both Soderbergh and Tarantino know well). Here, Boetticher transforms the simple story of a kidnapping into a backdrop to upset the values of his archetypes. I'd hesitate to call it a revisionist western - history isn't sober or even an issue, to be frank - but there's certainly a bracing freshness in the way the hero is still plugging a sexist attitude, the villian is dreaming of stability and minor characters seem to openly acknowledge that main characters have their place and ought not deviate from it. The love story that erupts out of close quarters has a strange, bullying edge that mutes what appears to be cover of love-out-of-necessity. There's a couple of brilliant, almost disturbing moments where the villians - despite using him to fetch their money - find a common ground with the hero in decrying Maureen O'Hara's husband's cowardice. Dialogue seems to make an effort to avoid the anachronistic modernspeak of most Hollywood westerns, falling somewhere between near authenticity and just plain cool sounding crackle.

First and foremost, it's methodical, moving every piece as carefully and confidantly as possible. Jean Gabin's performance is one of the coolest I've seen (certainly his best); Watching him move his weight without a single misstep over and over and over again did not only rub off on me, but left me with a sloppy grin I could barely contain all evening after watching it. Touchez Pas au Grisbi ("Don't Touch the Loot") swims in a school of films that downplayed the actual heist, relegating the violence and greed of robbery to characterization. It's a doozy here, showing us every possible variation, from the young crook trying to usurp power, to the aging sidekick lost in his own unreliability and lack of discipline, to the worn, hard-as-nails cafe owner who covers for the anti-heroes, to the showgirls, used as pawns more often than lovers. There's never a minute when you're not engulfed in the thing.

[I hate writing "A" reviews. I think, in knowing instinctually that you're watching greatness, there's almost no sense of wanting to express or define it. The abstraction is part of the great joy and intoxication. Why spoil it by putting your finger on it? What if you squish it and it, leaving it no choice but to become a mere critique? Mother of mercy, is this the end of this website?]

If there's anything it's not about - it's the woman who turns into a cat. Relegating the catalyst and her bizarre tendencies (stemming from an old folk legend in her homeland) to vague is-she-or-isn't-she teasing, Tourneur is able to successfully stave our desire to roll our eyes at how disconnected her little transformations seem in relation to the thoroughly outlandish and silly tale of a lonely architect marrying a this weird, not very alluring sketch artist (despite architect co-worker eagerly awaiting invitation to the sack at every turn). What Cat People is really about is mood: Sound (Tourneur's glee at the tapping of footsteps in one scene), vision (reflective water in a basement swimming pool lit by what appears to be a single light) and just plain pathos (cornered in the after-hours architecture firm by the hungry cat). As he displays in all three of his double-shot of similar menace the following year (I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man), it's always been a pretty creepy base to build on every day people  meeting up with the supernatural horrors they're laughed at for entertaining (voodoo in Zombie, the leopard in Leopard Man).

Probably a model for Curtis Hanson in using the city as a character in the film; The narration and constant documentary footage keep New York enough in the foreground that when the search for a killer inevitably turns on the by-the-numbers side, the film is still a fascinating vision of how easy it is to disappear into the urban eternity.

Though a moody procession and a girl locked in a cemetary at night are just two of several eerie happenings following the escape of a leopard in a remote Mexican town, Tourneur's sympathetic handling of a haunted serial killer and chapter-like roll-out of the characters (each is given enough meat to feel like the film is headed into a complete changeover) is the thing of genius here. Also, you can't go wrong with a film where a girl's mother, believing her to be overreacting, won't let her inside when she comes home without any corn meal (mama gets pooling blood under at her feet as a door prize.)

Occupied territory is well represented. "Go America" vibe permeates to distraction. Great vat fight with Ryan.

I agree. Make food out of people. Solve a problem logically. Start with our "actor".

I like how it works gangbusters in details: Giovanna's clearly too old to wander, but too young to be domesticated by a man she doesn't love, while Gino is too young to be tied down at all, but old enough to lust after her maturity; Murdering her husband finds both of them miserable and unable to enjoy each other or their proposed fantasy; Gino fails to realize the shame of a young girl he asks to pose as a prostitute in order to deflect the police in one scene; Irony seems to find the main characters no matter where they go, beautifully illustrating a worldview of not only "what goes around, et al", but that the end is always the same, no matter your course of travel (i.e. - predetermination crushes free will, an very prevalent attitude the characters seem unaware they have). I find the way Italian cinema of this period seems to mirror its characters (that is, to plug along aimlessly and restlessly, just as they do) to be somewhat frustrating. Visconti's camera movements are more deliberate and tailored for the cinema than the neorealist masters that would follow him, but he's also fond of theatrics - often to a fault.