Author: Bob Westal

A masterfully efficient thriller and the single most parodied Western of all time, “High Noon” is also one of the most controversial. In its day it was attacked as leftist propaganda – its premise was, and is, widely seen as a metaphor for the McCarthy era. Writer Carl Foreman was called in as a hostile witness to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the production, and later blacklisted. Also, its use of black and white photography and claustrophobic, noirish realism at a time when even low budget westerns were being made in eye-filling color, worried studio suits who wanted…

Since its release, “Heat” has only grown more popular among fans of ultra-macho action and angst, and it’s easy to see why. The first hour rolls like a freight train through a landscape of coolly professional cops and robbers with train-wreck psyches. And, of course, it also represents a cinematic summit meeting between the two superstar actors most closely identified with the 70s-generation of urban, ethnic leading men specializing in emotional extremes. It wasn’t the first time Al Pacino and Robert De Niro had been in the same movie (that was “The Godfather: Part II”), but “Heat” was the first…

There’s a truism that while many movies have writers as main characters, no film can really show the process of writing. Indeed, the two main characters in this clever, moving, sincere and extremely well-made and very meta literary coming-of-age tale from Norway seem to spend relatively little time at their PCs. Still, director Joachim Trier does as good a job as any film I can think of when it comes to exploring the interactive properties of creativity, friendship, psychology and testosterone. “Reprise,” co-written with Joachim Trier’s real-life writer friend, Eskil Vogt, starts out with two young, slightly spoiled, aspiring high-grade…

“Blast of Silence” isn’t that great of a movie. At its best, however, this unusual thriller, both behind and well ahead of its time, is effective, innovative, influential and memorable enough that the “lost masterpiece” talk the film generates actually makes some sense. This independently made barely post-noir thriller attempts to get us inside the head of Frank Bono (writer-director Allen Baron), a hit man who fancies himself a cold, skilled professional. Sent from Cleveland to New York to provide a mid-level mafia manager with his permanent pink slip over the Christmas holidays, Frank’s attempts to live an emotion-free life…

It says something that more than 27 years after the murder of John Lennon, the idea of making a movie about Lennon’s killer still feels wrong, or at least unnecessary. Which is not to say that first-time writer-director J.P. Schaefer definitely should not have attempted to make a film from the point of view of Mark David Chapman; it is saying that the burden was on him to provide some justification for ripping the scab off of this 20th century cultural tragedy. Though beautifully shot and technically highly accomplished, “Chapter 27” fails creatively on almost every level, and it certainly…

Sometimes, the legend of how a movie was made tends to overwhelm the actual film itself. Such is the case of “Fitzcarraldo,” hailed by many as one of director Werner Herzog’s best films. The story of its near-disastrous making became legend, due to a now-classic documentary by Les Blank, “Burden of Dreams,” helped along somewhat by controversies about the film’s use of South American natives as extras and onset workers, and the outsize personalities of director Herzog and star Klaus Kinski. “Fitzcarraldo” stars Kinski as a turn of the 20th century dreamer with a penchant for the song stylings of…

In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, a high living but apparently healthy 43-year-old editor at French “Elle,” suffered a massive and completely unexpected stroke. The result was what most of us would imagine to be a fate worse than death: a mercifully rare condition known as “locked-in syndrome,” in which the still fully functional brain is all but cut off from the body, resulting in near complete paralysis combined with unimpaired consciousness. In Bauby’s case, the only body motion he was allowed was some movement of his tongue, and the only means of communication was to blink one of his eyes. (The…

Like 1980’s now-classic “American Gigolo,” and 1992’s vastly underrated “Light Sleeper” (starring Willem Dafoe as a drug dealer with a heart of gold), “The Walker” is another mystery/character study from writer-director Paul Schrader about a seemingly shallow, or even amoral, man who turns out to be made of stronger stuff. While the low-key thriller plot here is even more muddled than usual, and the character study aspects are perhaps even less clear, there is still some thoughtful entertainment to be had here. The star of this morality play is Carter “Car” Page III (Woody Harrelson), the flamboyantly gay, beautifully dressed,…

When male movie buffs gather, they sometimes complain that most of today’s male leads are more boys than men – too many Tobey Maguires and Leonardo DiCaprios, they might say, not enough William Holdens. I’d hate to disillusion anyone, but even the hard-drinking movie tough guy-extraordinaire Bill Holden (“Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Network”) was, himself, a boy once – a quite callow golden boy, in fact. Worse, as Holden readily admitted, he’d have lost that crucial first gig were it not for the intercession of his leading lady, Barbara Stanwyck. “Golden Boy” was a big deal in its day.…

In theory there was absolutely nothing wrong with making a sequel to “Chinatown.” Why not make a second movie about J.J. “Jake” Gittes, the cynical but sensitive P.I. who endured an emotional hell and almost blew the lid off an epochal water-and-land scandal in the 1974 classic? After all, no one complained about sequelitis when Raymond Chandler followed up his first Philip Marlowe novel, “The Big Sleep” with a second novel, “Farewell, My Lovely,” and five more after that. But, “The Two Jakes” — which Jack Nicholson and screenwriter Robert Towne actually saw as the middle portion of a trilogy…