CINEMA GALLERY: 50 New Frames

As always, click on the photo you love to see it full screen:

A telephone call rushes through the wires and connects two distant people at the beginning of Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 94).

The scam is on in Grand Slam (Giuliano Montaldo, 67).

Mrs. Dalton appears behind the movie screen, with Everett Sloan making a cameo via Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai, in Manhattan

Saul Bass

Saul Bass (1920-1996) is best known as the graphic designer who pioneered not only the look of both movie posters and their opening credits sequences, but also the sleek appearance of the corporate logos that have become such a part of our lives (and, yes, you can groan if you want). In the 50s and 60s, it became a film critic cliche to state that his credits sequences alone were worth the price

Film #39: Full Metal Jacket

Maybe it's bizarre to start this review off with such an observation, but the problem with Oliver Stone's pre-emptive achievement with 1986's Platoon lay in that it, in effect, was Stone's (but perhaps not Hollywood's) simple way of glitzing over the true state of affairs during the Vietnam conflict, all in the name of good, clean, All-American storytelling. Stone's musculature was admirable;

R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

One of my favorite notable people died the other day--in fact, the very day I unknowingly, maybe psychically, posted a comment about viewers whom I feel incorrectly judge my favorite and, frankly, the best movie of all time, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction/fact writer who co-authored the script to 2001 with Stanley Kubrick, and then wrote the novel around the

Defending 2001

2001: A Space Odyssey is my favorite movie. Those real cinemaniacs out there will totally empathize with this, while the people who didn't understand the film or whose attentions drifted away while watching it will be baffled at the logic of my tastes. They'll say "Ewww, it's so boring" or--like I heard my dad say when I was a small child--"What the hell? There was a baby floating in space at the

Film #3: Eyes Wide Shut

Upon its release in 1999, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut promptly took its place alongside Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Antonioni’s L’Avventura, at least half of David Lynch’s entire oeuvre, and Kurosawa’s Dreams as one of the cinema’s great phantasms. If, upon seeing it, you’ve any sense of it sporting a traditional story--even a derailed or dull one--then, if you will pardon