Movie Reviews
Titles starting with T
Three Strangers
Three Strangers (1946) They are Sidney Greenstreet, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Peter Lorre. Geraldine lures the two men to her apartment, and then makes a strange bargain with them. The Chinese goddess of luck will grant their wishes if they make an agreement regarding a sweepstakes ticket at the stroke of midnight on Chinese New Year. They are dubious, but what will it cost them? Three ... Read more »
Throne of Blood
Akira Kurosawa is my favorite Japanese director, and among my favorite directors of any ethnicity. I have seen every one of his movies that is available on video (which is almost all of them), though I watched most of them before I started writing these reviews. He made a few (a very few) stinkers, like everyone but Kubrick does, and he made a lot of very, very good films, and an amazing ... Read more »
Through a Glass Darkly
Literal translation: As in a Mirror” Another gloomy one from Ingmar Bergman. It stars Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Max von Sydow and Lars Passgård, all of them members of Bergman’s so-called stock company. Andersson is Karin, who is going down the dark road of incurable schizophrenia. Van Sydow is her husband, Passgård is her brother (and there is ... Read more »
Throw Mamma From the Train
EXTRA BONUS HITCHCOCK MATERIAL: This movie was inspired by Strangers on a Train, and even uses some footage form it to explain what’s going to happen:
The night was … humid. The night was … moist. The night was …….. Billy Crystal is a writer who has written one book that his ex-wife stole from him and it became a best-seller. Now he’s blocked from the very ... Read more »
Thunder Afloat
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Boston Blackie movie. I bring this up not because this is one, but because it co-stars Chester Morris, who went on to star in fourteen of them. Maybe I should take a look at one sometime. Actually, I’ve never actually seen a whole Charlie Chan movie, either.
The main star here is the great Wallace Beery, the beefy, truculent working man with ... Read more »
Thunder Birds
Gene Tierney was one of the most beautiful women to work in Hollywood. Here she is in glorious super-saturated Technicolor, with lips as red as moist cherries, very dark brown hair, and pale blue eyes.
Oh, yeah, there’s some airplanes in it, too. The star is the Boeing-Stearman Model 75.or PT-17 trainer. It’s a biplane. After the war there were thousands of them available as ... Read more »
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
Lightfoot is Jeff Bridges, a carefree happy-go-lucky small-time thief. Thunderbolt is Clint Eastwood, so called because he once used a 20mm cannon to break into a vault at an armory. They hook up and become buddies in the usual reluctant way, at least on Clint’s part. They encounter two of Clint’s former partners in the big robbery, who think they have been ripped off. They weren’t, but ... Read more »
Thunderheart
This is a competent whodunit, and it’s directed by Michael Apted, a director we admire for his Up Series, but it didn’t quite work for me. It takes place on the Sioux rez in the 1970s, when there was a lot of turmoil with militant Indians and the FBI. Two agents were shot and killed, and Leonard Peltier went to prison for it, a case that is ... Read more »
THX-1138
I remember seeing this at the old Embassy Theater on Market Street in San Francisco when it was about a year old. (The Embassy was not a first-run theater. They specialized in triple features, and every day you could play Ten-O-Win for swell prizes!) It was totally unexpected, and this old SF fan was delighted. Nothing I’d seen was remotely like it. Even though ... Read more »
Tideland
Could a Terry Gilliam film possibly be as bad as what the critics were saying? This movie had a few champions, but you could count them on one hand and have lots of fingers left over. Yeah, The Brothers Grimm wasn’t that good, but it had its moment. This one has nothing boredom and nausea. Sadly, it seems to have been an important film to Gilliam, based on a book ... Read more »