The Night Listener

A boy is dying and a radio story-teller gets involved with him and his adoptive mother. But is he real? Reminds me a bit of Broken Flowers, and of Blow-Up. But while there’s good build-up, there’s very little payoff. It’s very short, like this review.

The Night Manager

There have been quite a few good movies made from John le Carré’s novels but they have, of necessity, been trimmed down so they fit in a two-hour time frame. Because they are even denser than your normal novel, much detail has to be cut. But I think the natural format for his books is the mini-series.

I can prove it, too. In 2011 an excellent movie was made from his book Read more »

Night Must Fall

CONTAINS SPOILERS Danny (Robert Montgomery) is a handyman—I thought he was Irish, but it seems he was supposed to be Welsh—who comes to work for nasty old Mrs. Bramson (Dame May Whitty) and soon charms his way into her heart with his gift of gab and willingness to lie. Olivia (Rosalind Russell) is the niece who is constantly belittled and abused—it’s a ... Read more »

Night of the Comet

There’s this comet, see, that’s going to pass real close to the Earth. It’s gonna be a real spectacular show, so everybody’s out in the streets with comet parties, to watch it all. Only, it drops this red dust all over everything, and people turn into red dust themselves, right in their clothes. (It might remind you of The Day of the Triffids, where a meteor shower blinded everyone who ... Read more »

Night of the Living Dead

Even a student of cinema like myself misses an “important” film here and there. Life is not long enough to see all the films you might like to see. Here is one I missed for a long time. And it is an important film, which I define as changing the game in some way. This is the granddaddy of all “shambling zombie” movies, the beginning of the plague we are suffering through right now, and I ... Read more »

The Night They Raided Minsky’s

I think a lot of people may not have seen or heard of this movie, but it’s one of my favorites. It was produced by Norman Lear and directed by William Friedkin, of all people. It was his first film with any budget at all, made three years before he hit it big with The French Connection. Since then he has mostly been known for hard-edged dramas such as Read more »

Night Train to Munich

Cracking good thriller with Rex Harrison as a secret agent daringly penetrating into Nazi Germany and Paul Henreid as a German pursuing him. Margaret Lockwood is the Woman in Peril. There’s a real nice shootout on a cable car in the Alps at the end. One of the distinct pleasures here are two minor characters imported from Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, two years ... Read more »

Night Will Fall

An extremely odd movie here. When the Russians and the Americans and the British began rolling over Germany and Poland and exposing the heretofore unimaginable horrors of the death camps, they were accompanied by combat photographers. Even the raw footage, which you have certainly seen, and which has been incorporated into any number of previous documentaries, is enough to make you puke. ... Read more »

Nightcrawler

Did you know there is actually a level of “journalism” lower than celebrity-driven paparazzi? It is the people who listen to police scanners all day and night, ready to hurry to the locations of fires (preferably fires where children get killed), car wrecks (ditto), and shootings. And, it must be said, the people at the news stations who buy this shit so they can grab your attention at six ... Read more »