Movie Reviews
Titles starting with C
The Circus
I don’t know how this one slipped by me. I became a Chaplin fanatic in college, when I discovered he wasn’t just this jerky (people often project old silents at 24 fps, when they were shot in 16 fps) little man, but a comic genius. I’ve seen dozens and dozens of his two-reelers, and thought I had seen all his features. But not this one. It is very, very good, like all his features (I’ll ... Read more »
Cisco Pike
My friend Kris Kristofferson looks very, very young in this, but he was actually already thirty-six, just the right age to play a musician who used to be big but now is out of fashion and scrambling to make a living dealing pot. This was his first movie. Karen Black plays his main squeeze, or “old lady” as we used to say. The great Harry Dean Stanton is his former music partner, and Gene ... Read more »
The Citadel
Robert Donat seems to me to be severely underrated these days. He’s best known for The 39 Steps and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, for which he won an Oscar. Quite an accomplishment in the year of Clark Gable and Gone With the Wind, which swept nearly everything else. I never saw him in anything where he was less than ... Read more »
Citizen Kane
PRODUCED / DIRECTED by Orson Welles
SCREENPLAY by Herman Mankiewicz & Orson Welles
ORIGINAL MUSIC by Bernard Herrmann
CINEMATOGRAPHY by Gregg Toland
ART DIRECTION by Van Nest Polglase
I came a little late to this movie, considering that I’d become a student of film during my brief time at college. At the film society I learned that Charlie Chaplin was ... Read more »
Citizen X
In the Soviet Union there is no prostitution. Soviet airliners do not fall from the sky. Crime is almost non-existent in the Soviet Union. Coal mines do not collapse, chemical factories do not blow up, nuclear dumps do not spontaneously spew waste over whole oblasts, and rocket ships do not explode on the pad in the Soviet Union. (All these things happened, and were covered up.) There is ... Read more »
City by the Sea
One of those forgettable movies. I saw it, I recall enjoying it, but I can’t remember a damn thing about it.
City Island
This was a new one on me. There is a place in The Bronx, almost in Connecticut, which is essentially a small fishing village. It is being relentlessly gentrified, I just checked Zillow and you can’t buy a house there for less than $500,000, up to a million or so. But they still fish. It is an island, though it looks like you could wade across from New York City Proper. Here a lifelong ... Read more »
City Lights: A Comedy Romance in Pantomime
WRITTEN / PRODUCED / DIRECTED by Charles Chaplin
ORIGINAL MUSIC by Charles Chaplin
CINEMATOGRAPHY by Gordon Pollock & Roland Totheroh
Sometimes I think The Gold Rush should be on this list. Sometimes I think maybe Modern Times. And of course there’s The Great Dictator. Shorts? Read more »
City of Ember
This might have been a good book. Tom Hanks and the other producers must have thought so, since they paid pretty good money for it and optioned the three sequels. But this one totally tanked, so I wouldn’t be looking for the continuing saga. It has the look of something that was cut down from a first cut 30, even 40 minutes longer. Everything is too hurried. The sets are massive, and look ... Read more »
City of God
One of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen. Hard to watch, the lives of these kids are brutal beyond belief, and it’s all based on a true story.