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Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie directors! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between.

Today we’re honored to chat with iconic director John Sayles, whose essential crime epic Lone Star is now available from The Criterion Collection in both 4K Uhd + Blu-ray.

Our B-Sides today include Limbo, Amigo, and Go For Sisters. We also discuss Sayles’ parallel careers as a screenwriter and a novelist. He talks about the work he did on the Toshirô Mifune/Scott Glenn actioner The Challenge (director John Frankenheimer asking him to write new draft over a weekend before an impending strike); he discusses what he learned working for Roger Corman early in his career; which genre he’s still itching to direct; his love of the recent Godzilla Minus One; and the slew of scripts that never got made.

By John M. Whalen

Howdy, pardners. It’s western movie roundup time at Cinema Retro today. Here are a handful of oldie westerns recently released on DVD by the Warner Archive- and which are now available in the Cinema Retro Movie Store. And a rootin’, tootin’, downright interesting bunch of movies they are.

Station West

First up, “Station West” with Dick Powell and Jane Greer. Ever wonder what would happen if private dick Philip Marlowe traveled back in time to the old west and tried to solve a murder case? That’s essentially what you have with Station West, an offbeat western filmed in black and white that plays like film noir, except all the men wear wide-brimmed Stetsons instead of Fedoras, and shoot Colt Peacemakers and Winchesters instead of snubbed nosed .38s. To further mix up the western and detective genres Jane Greer, the most fatale of all femme fatales,...

Review by Stephen Tronicek

There are two types of biopics out there: 1: Ones that try to accurately tell the story of the subject, and 2: The ones that try to accurately represent what it was like to be around the subject. The latter ones usually work better as movies because there’s feeling and emotion at the base of them rather than just a good story. Born To Be Blue for most of its running time is not that type of movie. It’s the first kind. A straightforward, and interesting take on the interesting life of an interesting man. When it does try to become the second kind, it doesn’t really work.

In the first 30 minutes the film tries to be the second kind of biopic, but stumbles in doing so. Most of it just ends up looking like unstructured and meaningless serialism. It seems like the...

The Big Red One

Written and directed by Samuel Fuller

USA, 1980

When a director like Samuel Fuller finally gets the chance to make his passion project, rest assured, there’s going to be more than a little of the man himself in the movie. With Fuller, this would have undoubtedly been the case no matter what type of film it was, but when the film is an autobiographical World War II yarn about the first infantry division — the “fighting first” — the filmmaker’s stamp is evident from start to finish. The Big Red One is an episodic chronicle of this military assembly, here focused on The Sergeant (Lee Marvin, adding classic film respectability), and the “four horsemen,” Pvt. Griff (Mark Hamill, adding contemporary film marketability), Pvt. Zab (Robert Carradine), Pvt. Vinci (Bobby Di Cicco), and Pvt. Johnson (Kelly Ward). The men who make up the four horsemen, a label that...

When Beyond: Two Souls was first announced, I was rather unsure what it really was. They were marketing it as an action oriented title, then slowly crept into it being a story driven title. Luckily they showcased the story driven part more and I became interested in it. This is what the game is, a long story that will make you go through emotions at the snap of a finger. It has its hiccups, but the game should go down in the books as one of the best titles ever made.

Console: PS3

What We Played: The Entire Game, plus several alternate timelines.

The game revolves around a character named Jodie and a spirit that Jodie calls Aiden. The beautiful thing about the game is that even the way you play it has a part in the story. The story is played out of chronological order, and takes place over 15 years of Jodie’s life.

Amigo ought to be a great film: the subject is fascinating and still resonates today, even though it takes place over a hundred years ago. The Philippine-American war has been pretty much ignored, by textbook authors as well as moviemakers (but for the 1937 Hollywood movie The Real Glory). As a result, writer-director John Sayles has a lot of information to get across in order for us to get the lay of the land, and understand the central characters and their conflicts. The setting is the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, with naïve American soldiers (many of…...