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Film history is littered with movies unappreciated in their time but reevaluated and rediscovered later — movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Sorcerer,” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” all of which bombed on their initial release but are now almost unanimously considered cases where audiences and critics got it wrong. But the reverse is also true — there are hundreds of films celebrated in their moment but eventually forgotten in spite of garnering awards attention, and wide audiences.

Two such movies, “The Citadel” (1938) and “The Enchanted Cottage” (1945), are newly available on Blu-ray from Warner Archive and worthy of rediscovery — these are cases where everyone had it right the first time around, a few dated elements in each notwithstanding. That both films have come to be seen as a bit creaky probably has as much to do with the inferior home video transfers they’ve been subjected to in the past as...

In the 1970s, Walter Hill established himself as a proficient writer (“The Getaway”) and director of smart, tight, character-driven action films that drew on the work of Ford, Hawks, and Kurosawa but had a wry, literary voice all their own. It was often said — including by Hill himself — that the urban crime movies in which Hill specialized were Westerns in disguise.

Yet there’s another genre to which Hill was and continued to be equally beholden, and that’s the Hollywood musical. Comparisons to Vincente Minnelli and Jacques Demy may not be as obvious as those to Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher, but Hill’s best work shares those directors’ careful attention to rhythm (both in terms of pacing within scenes and in terms of overall structure), color, and the dynamic movement of bodies in space.

Hill would make one film (“Streets of Fire”) with enough song and dance numbers...

John McPhail’s Scottish family comedyGrow, starring Golda Rosheuvel, Nick Frost and Alan Carr, and Campbell X’s BFI-backed Low Riderare among the 18 world premieres selected for this year’sEdinburgh International Film Festival (Eiff), taking place from August 14-20 in Scotland.

Low Rider is one of 10 films competing for the Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence, which comes with a £50,000 prize determined by audience vote. The film is a UK-South Africa co-production that follows the adventures of a woman as she flies from London to Cape Town to search for her absent father and stars Emma McDonald and Thishiwe Ziqubu.

The world premiere of a new animated short film directed by Renée Zellweger, called They, six James Bond movies starring the late Sean Connery screened in a special strand, and “In Conversation” events with the likes of Andrew and Kevin Macdonald, Andrea Arnold, Ben Wheatley and Andy Starke, and Nia DaCosta will all be part of this year’s 78th edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Among the movies in the program this year are the likes of Piotr Winiewicz’s About a Hero with Vicky Krieps, which was written by an AI system trained in Werner Herzog’s works, Eddie Marsan and Sam Claflin-starring “brooding, stylish thriller” All the Devils Are Here from Barnaby Roper, Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands, “a mysterious and Highsmith-esque existential thriller,” Urška Djukic’s debut feature and coming-of-age film Little Trouble Girls, and Elliot Tuttle’s Blue Film, starring Kieron Moore and Reed Birney.

Petticoats, pistols and lavish hats are just the surface of the Georgian world of Satisfaction from multi-dn alum director Bailey Tom Bailey’s delightfully playful venture into period filmmaking, telling the tale of an aristocratic duel fought between a society lady and her mentor over a trivial insult in 18th Century England. Writer Christopher Buckley adopts a revisionist lens, inspired by the hidden history of ‘Petticoat Duels’ – real duels fought between Georgian women – shining light on a ludicrous ritual of class, honour and social status. With razor-sharp wit, meticulous composition, and a thorny Baroque score, Bailey brilliantly transforms the stately displays of aristocracy into a tense, theatrical and fiercely feminine showdown,...

April showers bring May flowers, but May is bringing a whole bouquet of cinematic gems to transition from spring into summer. Perhaps the most timely of all the options listed below is Michael Mann’s biting takedown of American corporatization and its effect on mass media, “The Insider.” Nominated for Best Picture at the 2000 Academy Awards, the film follows “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) as he works to cultivate and protect a tobacco company whistleblower (Russell Crowe) who may be carrying the most vital public health story of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, when the legal team behind “60 Minutes” parent company CBS catch wind of the story — amidst a key merger with Westinghouse Electric no less — they do everything they can to keep the news piece from running lest it upend a possible deal. For those paying attention to current affairs, the narrative will have echoes to a...

At the outset of the 1960s, the United States felt poised for its greatest decade yet or armageddon. The Soviet Union's launch of the Earth satellite Sputnik in 1957 had placed many Americans on edge. How had the Russkies beaten the most prosperous country on the planet into space, and what were our leaders doing to counteract this disaster? This led to one of the most contentious and closest Presidential elections in U.S. history, which found Democrat John F. Kennedy narrowly prevailing over Republican Richard M. Nixon. Many were hopeful that the country was in the right, aspirational hands; almost just as many were convinced we'd consigned the country to certain doom.

In times like these, people used to go to their local movie theater to escape the fresh hell of the outside world. They'd line for any entertainment that promised some kind of catharsis. Romances, comedies, romantic comedies, horror flicks,...

It is a time-honored tradition in Hollywood that at a certain point of a movie star's career, they'll give an interview during which they'll reveal, "What I'd really like to do is direct." If what they'd also like to do is win an Oscar, it's not the worst idea. Established actors Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Richard Attenborough, Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, and Ron Howard all earned the Academy Award for Best Director, so the allure is there. Whether they've the talent and temperament to call the shots behind the camera is something you can't know until they give it a shot. Unless that person is Gary Busey.

The movie star's desire to direct wasn't so much of a thing in the 1940s and 1950s. If actors had aspirations beyond on-screen renown, they generally wanted to produce. This is what the biggest star of this period, John Wayne, did...

Friends will tell you Michael Schlesinger’s biggest passion among his many movie loves was for Stanley Kramer’s “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” or as he called it, “The Greatest Movie Ever Made.” But fortunately for cinephiles, his efforts elevated or brought about many important films during his career at United Artists Classics, Paramount, and Sony Repertory.

He died January 9, 2025 in Los Angeles at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where he was being treated for a rare and aggressive form of cancer only recently diagnosed. Though he was a behind-the-scenes executive little known by the public, he made a big impact professionally before he retired in 2012. He then began another career as a director, initially of comedy shorts, then last year with his feature debut “Rock and Doris (Try to) Write a Movie,” which premiered at the Palm Springs International Comedy Festival.

His passing has brought out an outpouring of grief and remembrances,...

Making movies is a hard business, but it’s much easier when you’re doing it with someone you value and respect. It seems the same can be said of picking movies, as collaborators Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste joined forces once again to take on the Criterion Closet. The two are currently promoting their most recent film together, “Hard Truths,” which is garnering Jean-Baptiste tremendous awards buzz, including recognition from the NYFCC, the Lafca, and the BIFAs this past weekend. She was previously nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Leigh’s 1996 Palme d’Or winner, “Secrets & Lies,” a film the pair look back on with fondness in the video below.

“Here’s a film you’re really going to like,” Leigh said, reaching for the film, to which Jean-Baptiste jokingly responded, “What’s that one about?”

After they both grabbed Charles Burnett...

Randolph Scott is one of the most recognizable and acclaimed actors in Western history, with a storied career spanning from 1928 to 1962. Scott's command of the screen was not just down to his towering, well-built 6'2" frame, but also his charismatic delivery, stellar performances, and good looks. He built career-long collaborations with some of the best Western directors in the genre, like Budd Boetticher and Henry Hathaway, which resulted in some of the most iconic Westerns of the time, cementing his legacy as one of the era's strongest leading men.

Though Scott appeared in many different roles in numerous varied genres, such as war, horror, and fantasy, it was his Western films that truly set him apart, showcasing his innate ability to portray rugged, complex characters. Some of the best Westerns he starred in, such as Ride the High Country and Ride Lonesome, show his skills at portraying a hero with...

Vanity Street.Broke and homeless, a young woman hurls a brick through the window of a drugstore, hoping to go to jail because at least “they feed you there.” Instead of arresting her, a kindly cop gets her a job as a showgirl at the theater next door; soon she’s wearing furs and fending off passes from top-hatted stage-door Johnnies. So it goes in lightning-paced B movies such as Vanity Street (1932), directed by Poverty Row maestro Nick Grinde. The plot may be flimsy, but Max Ophuls could have been proud of the long, breezy tracking shot that glides past the windows of the drugstore, packed with a motley crowd of chorus girls, costumed actors, and burlesque comedians. This casually terrific sequence is representative of the treasures that were to be found in the retrospective honoring the 2024 centenary of Columbia Pictures at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. Most of the films were short.

Notebook is covering the Locarno Film Festival with a series of correspondence pieces written by the participants in the Critics Academy.Illustrations by Lucy Jones.What happens to the body at a film festival? Over the course of the Locarno Film Festival, we tried—as much as decency allows—to investigate this very broad question. These responses seek to tie together the films we’ve seen with our embodied experiences of Locarno, both inside and outside of the cinema, grappling with the limits of our attention, our exhaustion, and our desires. Bitter Victory.Pierre Jendrysiak:Far from the expected glamor, attending a film festival can sometimes feel like the trek through the desert pictured in Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957): a dreamy haze, almost a struggle. Under the heat of the Locarno sun, one wanders the streets, looking for a nice bartender to refill their water bottle, a little bit...

Robert Benton’s Bad Company does for the western what Bonnie and Clyde, Benton’s earlier collaboration with screenwriter David Newman, did for the gangster movie, only without that film’s veneer of star-powered sex appeal. The scrappier Bad Company consistently undermines the romanticized notions of the frontier that underpinned several generations of genre filmmaking. The film especially takes direct aim at two of our nation’s dearest held myths: the Horatio Alger notion of economic self-sufficiency, and the destiny of political expansion manifest in Horace Greeley’s famous dictum: “Go west, young man!”

The film is also decidedly of a piece with the year of its release in 1972, evident from the very first scene, wherein we see a young man dragged kicking and screaming from his home by blue-clad Army soldiers to be conscripted into the Union cause. The moment is given a surreal punchline by the fact that...

Quick Links The Ranown Cycle of Films and The Studio Behind It Praise for The Ranown Cycle Westerns How to Watch The Ranown Cycle Westerns

When discussing the history of the Western genre, many names and movies spring to mind, whether it be the landmark John Wayne film Stagecoach (1939) or Clint Eastwood's masterful deconstruction of the genre with 1992's Unforgiven. However, there is one series of movies that are often overlooked and underrated.

The team-up of actor Randolph Scott, director Budd Boetticher, and producer Harry Joe Brown created a series known as the "Ranown Cycle" of Westerns. We will examine why these Westerns remain underrated, their importance in the genre's history, and why you should watch them.

The Ranown Cycle of Films and The Studio Behind It

The "Ranown Cycle" refers to a series of Western films made between 1956 and 1960, directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott. Prior to their collaboration,...

Clint Eastwood was already 30 years old when he landed his breakout role in the CBS Western "Rawhide." The actor had spent much of the 1950s getting by on bit parts in B movies (most notably the Jack Arnold monster duo of "Revenge of the Creature" and "Tarantula"), and guest roles on TV series like "Maverick" and "Death Valley Days," so you'd think he would've been thrilled. But Eastwood was displeased with his character Rowdy Yates, who, early on in the series' run, was a wet-behind-the-ears ramrod. At his age, he was eager to play a grown, capable man with enough years behind him to allow for a bit of mystery.

Eastwood's restlessness coincided with a shift in filmmakers' approach to the Western genre. Though maestros like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, and Budd Boetticher had allowed for moral ambiguity in their movies, the vast majority of Westerns were white...

The Tall T is more than the sum of its parts. A Western aimed squarely at adult audiences, Budd Boetticher's 1957 film elides a fatalistic view of the old West by appearing classical at a glance. It marks the second collaboration between Boetticher and lead actor Randolph Scott's "Ranown Cycle" of films. Ranown was the name of Scott's production company, and while the duo's first collaboration, 1956's Seven Men From Now, was not technically produced by Ranown, it inaugurated a run of low budget Westerns that would withstand the test of time and become highly influential. The Tall T, being the first official entry in the cycle, lays everything out in a lean, mean package. The technicolor visuals feel of a piece with classical Westerns of the era, but the content, largely owing to its origins as an Elmore Leonard short story, is bleak and provocative. The film navigates this dissonant tone economically,...

Nearly 40 years after he made his big screen debut with a brief appearance in the James Bond picture “A View to a Kill,” Dolph Lundgren is still best known as an actor thanks to a series of iconic roles in ’80s and ’90s favorites like “Rocky IV,” “Masters of the Universe,” and “Universal Soldier.” (More recently he’s been a fixture in the “Expendables” and “Aquaman” franchises.) Yet for the past couple of decades, Lundgren has been quietly forging a side career as an accomplished writer and director of low-budget action films, movies that belie their limited resources in ambition and craftsmanship. Like the scrappy genre directors of Hollywood’s past — filmmakers like Budd Boetticher, Sam Fuller, and Don Siegel — Lundgren uses the creative freedom of lower budgets to smuggle his personal obsessions and stylistic preoccupations into accessible entertainments that are as intelligent as they are lively.

Lundgren’s latest release,...

Ever since Martin Scorsese‘s “Killers of the Flower Moon” premiered at Cannes, critics have celebrated it as Scorsese’s first real Western after decades in which the genre’s influence could be felt at the edges of movies like “Casino” and “Gangs of New York.” The director himself sees it a little differently. As the guest on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast’s 250th episode, he said, “How can I make a Western? I come from the Lower East Side. The guys who made Westerns, when they came out [to Los Angeles], they were riding horses. The old cliché of the director wearing jodhpurs? Well, that’s what they did — you got around on a horse, you had to wear boots, you had to have a riding crop.”

Scorsese feels that the Western as he knew it in childhood ended with Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” in 1969, and that it’s...

There was no doubt in any IndieWire editor’s mind when selecting our list of the Best First Films of 2023: Felipe Gálvez’s “The Settlers” had to be on there. The otherworldly Western, which Mubi is opening in theaters January 12, is Chile’s submission to the 96th Academy Awards, and you can see why: It’s bold, uncompromising storytelling — for a story that needs to be told. Watch the IndieWire exclusive trailer for “The Settlers” below.

Set in the 1890s, “The Settlers” is about the genocide of the Indigenous Selk’nam people who lived in Tierra del Fuego, where the landscapes look more like Iceland than what you might first associate with South America. This is a history that hasn’t often been taught in Chile, and it’s a mark of the nation’s reckoning with its own history that its selection committee for the Oscars would pick...

The holidays are upon us, so whether you looking for film-related gifts or simply want to pick up some of the finest the year had to offer in the category for yourself, we have a gift guide for you. Including must-have books on filmmaking, the best from the Criterion Collection and more home-video picks, subscriptions, magazines, music, and more, dive in below.

Giveaways

In celebration of our holiday gift guide, we’ll be doing a number of giveaways! First up, we’re giving away My First Movie Vol. 2, a three-part ‘lil cinephile series by Cory Everett and illustrator Julie Olivi, featuring My First Spaghetti Western, My First Yakuza Movie, and My First Hollywood Musical.

Enter on Instagram (for My First Yakuza Movie), Twitter (for My First Hollywood Musical), and/or Facebook (for My First Spaghetti Western) by Sunday, November 26 at 11:59pm Et. Those that enter on all three platforms...

The end of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1950s is an oft-mourned loss by anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time watching Turner Classic Movies or browsing the tiles on the Criterion Channel. Hollywood still makes great movies all the time, of course, but what has been lost is the volume of modest and unassuming but expertly crafted mid-range genre films. What made the classical era unique wasn’t the groundbreaking art of an Alfred Hitchcock or a John Ford; every age has its titans, and one could argue that in just the past few months we’ve had several Hollywood movies as bold and distinctive as any in the industry’s past.

What the now-defunct studio system gave us was a robust slate of movies from directors whose names were not known to the general public — directors like Michael Curtiz, Mitchell Leisen, Budd Boetticher, and several...

In the opening scene of the 1957 western The Tall T, a man on horseback is spotted from afar by a boy and his father, prompting the elder homesteader to fetch his rifle. The audience shares their uncertainty, seeing this figure through a telephoto lens from a great distance, but when the stranger gets closer to the ranch, he’s recognized by the boy as an ally.

It’s the film’s hero, Pat Brennan (Randolph Scott), a fellow rancher, and the gun is therefore set aside. The Tall T is the first in a series of westerns grouped under the name Ranown (after producer Harry Joe Brown and Scott’s production company) that director Budd Boetticher made in the late ’50s and concluded with the release of Comanche Station in 1960, and in this inaugural scene, Boetticher establishes a crucial theme and visual pattern of this spiritually unified set of potboilers.

And now for something completely different: After attracting attention and appreciation with his debut feature, “Monster,” a riveting contemporary drama about a Black high school honor student charged as an accessory to a fatal shooting in his Harlem neighborhood, director Anthony Mandler continues to impress with his sophomore effort, “Surrounded,” an exceptionally well-crafted Western that spins a gripping, racially charged tale of suspicion, deception and survival in post-Civil War New Mexico. Echoes of Sergio Leone, Budd Boetticher and John Ford abound throughout the sturdy screenplay by Andrew Pagana and Justin Thomas. But the movie is less a genre pastiche than a multifaceted character study in which perfectly cast lead players Letitia Wright (“Black Panther”) and Jamie Bell (“Snowpiercer”) do most of the narrative heavy lifting.

It’s 1870, and ex-slave Mo Washington (Wright) is determined to start a new life by journeying westward. Disguised as a man for her own protection,...

In Budd Boetticher’s 1959 parable of how we remember violence, “Ride Lonesome,” Randolph Scott confronts the man who killed his wife at the very spot where he murdered her.

“That was a long time ago,” the killer said. “I’d almost forgot.” Scott’s reply? “A man can do that.”

So too can a society. Especially when it’s all too convenient to forget things so unpleasant they may shake our very sense of identity. Felipe Galvez’s Chilean Western “The Settlers” may remind some viewers of a Boetticher film when they’re watching it: following three men on horseback on a cross-country journey, it dramatizes questions of identity and belonging, and how these things can be written in violence. Most Boetticher-like, in a tight 98 minutes “The Settlers” says more than a lot of films double its length. It’s one of the most chilling art-Westerns to come along in some time,...

July 2023 will sizzle no matter where you live, judging by what the Criterion Collection plans to release that month. Martin Scorsese's After Hours, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, and Carl Franklin's One False Move are all significant films that are getting upgrades to 4K Uhd editions, as are the five films that comprise The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher. These are all essential purchases for your personal movie library, if you don't already own one or more of them. In that case, it becomes a question that you will need to consider: is it worth the upgrade to 4K? We will see: are you a fan of Westerns? Then Boeeticher is one of the the finest to ever direct them. Do you rejoice...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Summer is on the way, and The Criterion Collection is ready to take over those outdoor movie nights. Though still a couple of months away, the July 2023 batch of films joining the collection have been announced. Among them are The Watermelon Woman, Breathless, After Hours, The Ranown Westerns: Five Films Directed by Budd Boetticher, and One False Move. All titles will receive physical Blu-ray editions and special features. Excluding The Watermelon Woman, each film also gains a 4K restoration.

How many movies are roundly better than Martin Scorsese’s After Hours? Whatever the number (seriously: six?) it is now surely among the greatest in the Criterion Collection, which will add a 4K Uhd edition in July––sufficiently packed with features, among them a new interview between Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz, who I assume will expand on her main talking point (New York used to be different). Breathless, as established a title as they have, is also getting an upgrade that fortunately retains all features from their earlier release, while Carl Franklin’s One False Move scores 2,160 pixels.

But the most purely sizable July offering is their Budd Boetticher 4K Uhd set, Criterion’s first such, boasting five films: The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station. Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman “only” getting Blu-ray seems small in comparison, but few restorations from...

Quentin Tarantino crowned Sergio Corbucci as the second-best director of Italian westerns, but our vote goes to Sergio Sollima — this is the most satisfying Spaghetti oater outside of the Leone corral. In his first starring role, Lee Van Cleef is lawman Jonathan Corbett, who pursues Tomas Milian’s killer into Mexico for an American millionaire. Political screenwriter Franco Solinas helped cook up the story, which pitches frontier ethics against ‘establishment’ corruption. The two-disc special edition presents the show in 4 versions, if we count a clever English-Italian language hybrid.

The Big Gundown

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1967 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 110, 90, 95 min. / La resa dei conti / Street Date February 13, 2023 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £22.99

Starring: Lee Van Cleef, Tomas Milian, Walter Barnes, Nieves Navarro, Gérard Herter, Manolita Barroso, Robert Camardiel, Ángel del Pozo, Luisa Rivelli, Luis Barboo, Benito Stefanelli.

Cinematography: Carlo Carlini

Set decorators: Carlo Leva, Carlo Simi, Nicola Tamburo

Costumes: Carlo...

There is no more precarious moment in a movie star's career than the day they wake up, flush with box office success, and declare, "What I'd really like to do is direct!" Slightly less dangerous is a star's inclination to produce –- i.e., to diversify their career by generating material that reflects their taste or broadens their brand.

Two years after the end of World War II, John Wayne, who'd sat out the civilization-saving conflict while colleagues like James Stewart and Henry Fonda served, realized he was the biggest star in Hollywood and ought to start calling his own shots. Rather than direct, he found a quaint Western called "Angel and the Badman" written by James Edward Grant, in which a Quaker woman nurses a wounded gunfighter back to health. For an actor who'd made his name as a kickass, take-charge hero in Westerns and war movies, this was an oddly anti-violent movie.

The closing title card of the new Western Dead for a Dollar includes the dedication “In Memory of Budd Boetticher.” Had director Walter Hill worked during Boetticher’s era, he too may have churned out exceptional, modestly budgeted Westerns at a clip of roughly one a year, like Boetticher did for Columbia Pictures in the 1950s. Instead, Hill has settled for being one of a handful of contemporary repeat practitioners of the Western, a disparate group ranging from Clint Eastwood to the Coen Brothers, Kevin Costner to Quentin Tarantino. Hill’s first Western, The Long Riders—a retelling of the Jesse James story that […]

The post “Don’t Shoot Too Many Takes”: Walter Hill on Dead for a Dollar first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Once the biggest staple of Hollywood filmmaking, the Western has seen ebbs and flows through the history of cinema. In recent decades you’d be hard-pressed to find many examples in multiplexes near you—especially ones that fit the traditional mold of the genre, rather than tongue-in-cheek revisionist takes. It’s fitting, then, that it would be Walter Hill who would deliver a new gift onto audiences eager for a journey into that gunslinging world.

Hill has said that all his films are Westerns, which can certainly be seen for anyone familiar with his oeuvre—from his directorial debut in 1975’s Hard Times through 1987’s neo-Western Extreme Prejudice, his own revisionist streak of Westerns in the early ‘90s with Geronimo: An American Legend and Wild Bill, and even into 21st century actioners like Bullet to the Head. Whether he’s in the traditional milieu of the genre or not, those...

Walter Hill’s Dead for a Dollar is the kind of movie they don’t make anymore. A rough and tumble Neo-western, despite a modest budget Hill’s assembled a strong Western programmer (read my review). He’s helped along by a top-shelf cast, including Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Benjamin Bratt, and Warren Burke. I recently spoke to all five guys in one interview block as part of the junket for the movie.

Christoph Waltz, who plays the bounty hunter hero Max Borlund is, as always, an eccentric interview, with a comment about his unique cowboy hat leading to a bit of a rant about hat makers and the chemicals they used to make them. Interesting.

As Joe Cribbens, Borlund’s lifelong enemy, Willem Dafoe discusses his first time making a western, while Walter Hill explains the movie’s dedication to his mentor, Western director Budd Boetticher. Meanwhile, the awesome...

Walter Hill is back with "Dead for a Dollar." The influential writer and director behind "48 Hrs," "Streets of Fire," Southern Comfort," "The Driver," and "The Warriors" has returned with another western. For Hill, all of his movies, in one way or another, are westerns. He tends to follow cowboys whether in the streets of New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, or in this case, Mexico. 

Hill's latest follows a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) sticking to his guns, both morally and literally. It's an ensemble film also starring Benjamin Bratt, Rachel Brosnahan, Willem Dafoe, and Warren Burke. Hill doesn't delight in the times he's depicting, only in the genre. "Dead for a Dollar" is now in good company with Hill's previous big-screen westerns, "Geronimo: An American Legend," "The Long Riders," and "Wild Bill." Recently, the filmmaker talked to us about his love of westerns and his exceptional contributions to the genre.

Plot: In 1897, a veteran bounty hunter, Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz), is hired to find Rachel Price (Rachel Brosnahan), the wife of a businessman who’s supposedly been abducted by a black soldier, Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott) and is now being held for ransom. He soon discovers that Rachel is far from a captive and is with Elijah by choice, putting him on a collision course with her husband, plus a Mexican land baron named Tiberio Vargas (Benjamin Bratt). He also has to worry about his sworn enemy, Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe), who’s working for Vargas and is bent on killing the bounty hunter.

Review: Walter Hill’s Dead for a Dollar is an interesting Neo-western with an agreeably off-kilter cast and a solid premise. Hill’s one of the few directors still working in the sphere, directing a handful of solid, modern westerns, including The Long Riders, Wild Bill and Geronimo: An American Legend.

(From left) Warren Burke, Rachel Brosnahan, and Christoph Waltz in Walter Hill’s Dead For A Dollar Photo: Quiver Distribution Director Walter Hill is 80 years old, so unless he cranks out something real good real fast, his most widely remembered directing effort will be the 1982 Eddie Murphy-Nick Nolte action comedy 48 Hrs.

This review originally ran Sept. 6, 2022, for the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Maybe you can judge a film by its title. Consider “Dead for a Dollar:” It certainly sounds like a Western, doesn’t it? The “dollar” might call to mind some of the classics of the genre, while the “dead” at least promises a few good shoot-outs, a bit of bloody fun.

Only taken together, the name does have a somewhat frictionless quality — “timeless,” if you want to be generous, “generic” if you don’t. Which makes it so perfectly apt for Walter Hill’s perfectly perfunctory new film.

The fact that the filmmaker behind “48 Hrs.” and “The Warriors” will be honored with a career achievement prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival no doubt pushed his latest, low-budget Western towards such a tony debut, while the cast of Willem Dafoe and...

(From left) Rachel Brosnahan, Christoph Waltz, and Warren Burke in Walter Hill’s Dead For A Dollar Photo: Quiver Distribution A disciple of Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher—the latter of whom he dedicates Dead For A Dollar to—Walter Hill has been a fixture of American filmmaking for more than five decades.

In his 1962 essay, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," critic Manny Farber comes firmly down on the side of filmmakers and actors who are completely at odds with the zeitgeist or trends, and nibble away at the edges of genre and ever present B-Film tropes and ideas with skill and verve. He called this kind of filmmaking Termite Art. I am not sure what position Farber would take on Walter Hill's latest film, a simmering small budgeted Western shot in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a talented and diverse set of character actors all spinning slowly, spokes on familiar axis of the classic American Western. Dead for A Dollar is dedicated to Budd Boetticher, perhaps the ultimate...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Henry Silva, an actor with a striking look who often played villains and had credits in hundreds of films including “Ocean’s Eleven” and “The Manchurian Candidate,” died of natural causes Wednesday at the Motion Picture Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif., his son Scott confirmed. He was 95.

One of Silva’s most memorable roles came in John Frankenheimer’s classic thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), in which he played Chunjin, the Korean houseboy for Laurence Harvey’s Raymond Shaw — and an agent for the Communists — who engages in a thrilling, well-choreographed martial arts battle with Frank Sinatra’s Major Bennett Marco in Shaw’s New York apartment.

Silva appeared in a number of other movies with Sinatra, including the original, Rat Pack-populated “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960) with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., where he was one of the 11 thieves, and 1962 Western “Sergeants 3.”

His death was...

For many years now Venice has been a respectful platform for those big-name directors of the 1970s and early ’80s who are happy to go back into the fray long after those juicy studio budgets dried up: Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Paul Verhoeven, John Carpenter and — to a lesser extent — George Romero all found a home here for their late-period passion projects. Walter Hill, now 80, joins their ranks with an improbably youthful horse opera, and while it shows up the limitations of both writing and shooting a Western in the modern age, it’s nevertheless a wickedly enjoyable genre romp and full of violent surprises.

Hill dedicates his film to Budd Boetticher, which is a shame as it has already given critics permission not to think any harder...

The title of Walter Hill’s “Dead for a Dollar” makes it sound like a spaghetti Western, and the picture opens with stunning vistas and a wistfully valorous neo-Morricone score that gives you the impression — maybe the hope — that it will be. It ends on a very different note: a series of titles explaining, with precise dates and details, what happened to each of the main characters, as if the film were based on a true story. It’s the “American Graffiti” gambit of treating fictional characters as though they were real, only in this case it ends up revealing something essential about the drama we’ve been watching. Namely, how it could be so avid, specific, and scrupulously carpentered…yet remote.

Hill, who is now 80 but still directs with his lean-and-mean vigor and classical rawhide stoicism, builds “Dead for a Dollar” around a vintage confrontation between two men: Max Borlund,...

Budd Boetticher’s excellent semi-autobiographical film may be Hollywood’s most uncondescending depiction of high-end Mexican culture. Robert Stack is the pushy Gringo who only slowly understands Latin society’s definitions of loyalty and machismo; his rocky relationship with Joy Page’s cultured señorita is as important as the bullfighting story with Gilbert Roland. It’s Boetticher’s best film, presented for the first time in two encodings, the 87-minute release version and the UCLA Film and TV Archive’s restoration of the full 124-minute seen South of the Border. The extra commentary and featurettes are welcome too.

Bullfighter and the Lady

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1951 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 124 + 87 min. / Torero, Muerte en la arena, Tarde de toros, L’amante del torero, El torero y la dama, Death in the Sands / Street Date , 2022 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Robert Stack, Joy Page, Gilbert Roland, Virginia Grey,...

Wendell Corey plays bank clerk Leon Poole whose mild-mannered demeanor disguises a ruthless killer. Joseph Cotten plays the detective who killed Poole’s wife and makes his own wife a target for the deranged Poole. Director Budd Boetticher and cinematographer Lucian Ballard took a break from sagebrush dramas to shoot this atmospheric crime picture on the mean streets of L.A. in just 15 days—those authentic locales and that harried schedule made this 1956 thriller even more riveting.

The post The Killer is Loose appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Kino’s Noir boxes offer interesting noir-adjacent crime and mystery pix. This seventh return to the well of darkness brings up the organized crime ‘meller’ Chicago Confidential with Brian Keith and the more ambitious The Boss, starring John Payne and written by Dalton Trumbo. The third show The Fearmakers is a real oddity. Starring Dana Andrews and directed by Jacques Tourneur, it’s a political conspiracy tale about manipulating opinions with fraudulent polls. It sounds a lot like the fractured state of modern America, 65 years later. With commentaries by Jason A. Ney and Alan K. Rode.

Film Noir the Dark Side of Cinema VII

The Boss, Chicago Confidential, The Fearmakers

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1956-1958 / B&w / Street Date June 7, 2022 / 249 min. / available through Kino Lorber / 49.95

Starring: John Payne, Gloria McGehee, Brian Keith, Beverly Garland, Dana Andrews, Marilee Earle.

Directed by Byron Haskin, Sidney Salkow, Jacques Tourneur

Kino treads the dark...

It’s the final theatrical western of the legendary director Budd Boetticher, and he also wrote the screenplay! Ace cinematographer Lucien Ballard was behind the camera, and Audie Murphy produced and plays Jesse James! This disc release is a gift to die-hard western fans that want to see everything, but the film itself remains a mystery — oddly nihilistic and cruel, but also awkward, with amateurish acting, slack direction and a TV-movie appearance. The one gotta-see factor for completists is Victor Jory’s three scenes as Judge Roy Bean: he nails the sleazy, gross-out charm of the Texas threat to civilization, chewing the scenery like a pro.

A Time for Dying

Region Free Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1969 (1982) / Color / 1:85 widescreen + 1:37 Academy / 72 min. / Zeit zum Sterben / Street Date March 22, 2022 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Richard Lapp, Anne Randall, Robert Random, Beatrice Kay, Victor Jory, Audie Murphy, Burt Mustin, Peter Brocco,...

The Stranger Wore a GunIn the pantheon of great Western collaborations sits three mantels: John Wayne and John Ford, James Stewart and Anthony Mann, Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher. There is another mantelpiece, unvarnished and dirty from disuse: Randolph Scott and André De Toth. Does it belong there? Elements, directions, suits in a deck—the trappings of the West always come in fours. Why does this cycle of films lack a reputation, good standing, or even a quick moniker? Skronky where Ford is rhythmic, constricted where Mann is open, jagged where Boetticher is smooth, the De Toth films, six all told with Scott, give, rather than a cohesive persona or moral treatise, a cluster of pictures and ideas on a centerless society. Brass lanterns blown dark, drawn-out fistfights, flaming wagons streaking across the plains, gunfights in pitch-black bars; these images run across the sextet, fogging the hopeful vision of the American West.

There is a distinct flavor of the brawnily austere Westerns that comprise Budd Boetticher’s cult-favorite Ranown Cycle — and more than a hint of another showcase for the great Randolph Scott, Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” — in director Michael Feifer’s “Last Shoot Out,” a small-budget indie that aims to please the currently underserved niche audience for oaters.

To be sure, no one will ever confuse this slow-paced concoction with one of the classics that so obviously influence it. But it’s definitely a cut above some of the recent streaming-ready attempts to sustain the genre — indeed, it’s a marked improvement over Feifer’s own “Catch the Bullet,” released just last September — and it features a ferociously nasty turn by Bruce Dern in a role that recalls a character from yet another golden oldie, Walter Brennan’s vicious Old Man Clanton in “My Darling Clementine.”

Dern doesn...

The holidays are upon us, so whether you looking for film-related gifts or simply want to pick up some of the finest the year had to offer in the category for yourself, we have a gift guide for you. Including must-have books on filmmaking, the best from the Criterion Collection, Kino Lorber, and more home-video picks, subscriptions, magazines, music, and more, dive in below.

4K & Blu-ray Box Sets

There’s no better gift for a cinephile than a beautiful Blu-ray box set. Leading the pack in this regard is a collection that actually arrived much earlier this year: World of Wong Kar-wai, the long-awaited Criterion release that features the Hong Kong master’s most celebrated works, along with the first U.S. release of his short The Hand. Another must-own trio of sets from Criterion: Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films, featuring four bold films from the late director, The...

MGM sends James Stewart and Anthony Mann to Colorado high country locations for their third big-ticket western, a tight & tense psychological drama with a select cast: Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker and Millard Mitchell. Stewart’s anguished bounty hunter is a sick man on a mission he knows is self-destructive and just plain wrong; it’s the actor’s most fraught western performance. The landscape itself is psychological, with treacherous rocky outcroppings and a dangerous river. Even more impressive is the new restoration from Technicolor elements: this is one of the most beautiful westerns yet out on disc.

The Naked Spur

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1953 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 91 min. / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date September 21, 2021 / 21.99

Starring: James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker, Millard Mitchell.

Cinematography: William C. Mellor

Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown

Film Editor: George White

Production Illustrator: Mentor Heubner

Stunt Performers: Virginia Bougas, Ted Mapes,...