News

Actor Sydney Sweeney has shined in films and TV shows across several genres, including drama, horror, romance, and comedy. With her performances in projects like Euphoria, Immaculate, Anyone but You, and The White Lotus, Sweeney has proven herself to be one of modern Hollywood's most versatile actors. She recently dabbled more in sci-fi with her role in Madame Web, and the genre may be the next big step in her acting career.

Sci-fi continues to be one of the most popular and successful genres in the film industry, with Dune: Part Two being one of the most successful movies of 2024. Given the right sci-fi project, Sweeney could turn into an even bigger star by becoming the new face of the genre. Fortunately, Sweeney seems to have found the perfect role for her as the lead in Barbarella, a remake of the so bad it's good cult movie Barbarella from 1968 that...

1977's "The Spy Who Loved Me" is a landmark James Bond film for several reasons. For one, it fully cemented Sir Roger Moore as Bond, establishing his take on the character as distinctive and separate from Sean Connery and George Lazenby. For another, it introduced another recurring character to the continuity-lite franchise: Richard Kiel's imposing (and mostly silent) henchman, Jaws. The film also featured a then-groundbreaking stunt sequence, a buzzworthy moment that helped it become the massive box-office hit the franchise needed in order to continue at all after the underperformance of "The Man With the Golden Gun."

Most intriguingly for the spy movie in general, however, "The Spy Who Loved Me" introduced the notion of detente between Her Majesty's Secret Service (represented by Bond) and the Kgb (represented by Barbara Bach as Anya Amasova). This spirit of tolerance and occasional cooperation continued throughout the next several Bond films,...

When Jane Fonda was preparing for the galactic striptease that opens the 1968 sci-fi fantasy Barbarella, she plied herself with vodka. She was so terrified that she made sure she was completely drunk before the cameras started rolling. A bat flew in front of the lens, spoiling the shot, and the director, her then-husband Roger Vadim, insisted that she shoot it again the next day.

“The take that was actually used, I was not only drunk. I was hungover too,” Fonda recalled in the 2018 documentary about her, Jane Fonda in Five Acts.

It’s one of the most memorable sequences in an otherwise patchy and eccentric movie that scarcely deserves its cult reputation. Fonda appears to be floating as she pulls off her outfit. In fact, she was lying on a pane of glass with the rest of the spaceship behind her for the shot. While she removes her helmet, gloves and eventually everything else,...

Production Designer Ken Adam, Producer Albert R. Broccoli and Director Lewis Gilbert on the original "007 Stage" at Pinewood Studios.

It was the biggest James Bond film to date. Released in 1977, Roger Moore's third 007 film, "The Spy Who Loved Me", restored the series to its former grandeur, following the anemic reaction to the previous film "The Man with the Golden Gun". Producer Albert R. Broccoli was making his first Bond movie without his former partner, Harry Saltzman, who ended their partnership after "Golden Gun". Broccoli was determined to go all-out and backed his plans by getting United Artists to provide the biggest budget the franchise had ever enjoyed. Broccoli made sure every penny was on the screen and constructed the largest sound stage in the world at Pinewood Studios. American Cinematographer magazine has long provided detailed behind-the-scenes coverage of the making of the Bond films. They have reprinted their on-set visit...

I.Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (1964) is one of the most tantalizing unfinished projects in cinema history. If completed, it would have told a story of extreme jealousy and obsession. The plot is simple—a hotel owner, Marcel (Serge Reggiani), begins to suffer from nightmarish visions in which his young wife Odette (Romy Schneider) appears in various lascivious poses and sometimes erotically interacts with another man. Marcel gradually descends into madness and may, in the end, be driven to kill his wife. Generously backed by Columbia (via the French production company Orsay Films), Clouzot shot in black and white as well as in color, employing three separate film crews, no less than 12 cameras, and a large number of technicians and film craftsmen, including some of the most established industry names of the time. For six months, three cameramen—Claude Renoir, Armand Thirard and Andréas Winding—shot seemingly endless studio tests and,...

David’s Quick Take for the Tl;Dr Media Consumer:

The resume is solid and the references check out: Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim each shouldering a directorial third of the project, with talented crews working at their behest to create visually elegant environments to support the stories they tell. Top shelf recruits from leading “beautiful people” actors of their generation: Brigitte Bardot. Alain Delon. Jane Fonda. Peter Fonda. And then there’s Terence Stamp, probably less renowned than the preceding quartet, is roguishly seductive as a disheveled blond wastrel with a suicidal bent. Source material drawn and freely adapted from short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Ray Charles contributes to the soundtrack. A goosebump inducing first person Pov midnight dash through the streets and alleyways of Rome in a vintage 1964 Ferrari Lmb Fantuzzi just adds extra sprinkles on top. Though the overall impact of the film makes it...

1977 is our "Year of the Month" for July. So we'll be celebrating its films randomly throughout the month. Here's Daniel Walber...

Looking back at the films of '77, the clear production design stand-out is Star Wars. It won the Oscar and changed the world, though not necessarily in that order. Science fiction was crossing over, pushed even further by fellow nominee Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But why talk about harder sci-fi when you could focus on the futuristic gadgetry and technological excess of the James Bond franchise?

The Spy Who Loved Me is a remarkable showcase for legendary production designer Ken Adam, who passed away earlier this year. He built models of the Pyramids, a cavernous office for the head of the Kgb and a decadent underwater lair for nefarious shipping magnate Karl Stromberg (Curt Jurgens). But the real showstopper is the interior of the Liparus supertanker, the...

30. Lady Snowblood Part 1 and Part 2

While American comic books have struggled for legitimacy as adult entertainment for decades, their Japanese counterparts have long enjoyed acceptance as legitimate elements of mainstream culture. So while the American comic book movie only properly took off in the last fifteen years, jidaigeki adaptations of popular manga have been a staple of Japanese pulp cinema since the early 1970s. The best of these remains Lady Snowblood, director Toshiya Fujita’s two part revenge opera of a woman checking off a kill list of the gangsters who killed her family and left her for dead. Any familiarity to Kill Bill is entirely intentional, with multiple visuals, soundtrack elements and plot points lifted whole cloth by Tarantino. But even for those only familiar with the update, Fujita’s films remain feats of hard edged efficiency, actress Meiko Kaji a goddess of death in a world of opposing colors and sudden violence.

Criterion repackages Jean Renoir’s 1951 classic The River for Blu-ray, one of the master filmmaker’s several titles in the collection (fans may recall that Renoir’s Grand Illusion was the very first Criterion title). A title significant in many respects, being the first Technicolor film in India and Renoir’s first color feature, it’s simplistic beauty has gone on to influence future generations of filmmakers, including its prominently vocal champion Martin Scorsese. It also served as a launching pad for Satyajit Ray, who worked as an assistant on the film, and who would go on to create his own stunning debut four years later with the first chapter of his Apu trilogy, Pather Panchali (1955).

We experience the childhood of Harriet (Patricia Walters) in retrospect, her off-screen adult voice recounting one particular stretch of time while growing up in India with her mother (Nora Swinburne) and father (Esmond Knight...

A Day in the Country

Written and directed by Jean Renoir

France, 1936

Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country comes at a curious point in the director’s career. In 1936, he had several exceptional silent films to his credit, as well as such classics of early French sound cinema as La Chienne (1931), Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), and The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936), among others. But he had still not yet achieved his singular place on world cinema’s pre-war stage. That he would do just a year later, with La Grande Illusion (1937). As noted on the new Criterion Blu-ray, A Day in the Country was “conceived as a short feature…[and] nearly finished production in 1936 when Renoir was called away for The Lower Depths. Shooting was abandoned then, but the film was completed with the existing footage by Renoir’s team and released in its current form in 1946, after the...

Finally seeing Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses (a.k.a. Et mourir de plaisir, 1960) in a watchable, if imperfect form, was a minor revelation. (If all you're interested in is major revelations, move along.) By plundering freely from Cocteau, and doing so with some panache, Vadim surpasses his usual standard of titillation and serves up some haunting images, with much help from regular cinematographer Claude Renoir (yes, of that family), and anticipates a whole lot of developments in the European horror field.

By borrowing both from La belle et la bête (a masked ball allows the cast to get into period costume) and Orphée (mythology goes mod) Vadim is paving the way for all those films that combine Gothic with pop, particularly those of Jean Rollin, who simply upped the kink factor while retaining the crumbling castles, vampires and costumed role-play pioneered by Vadim.

The movie would doubtless be...

By Lee Pfeiffer

When it opened in 1970, director Lewis Gilbert's film version of Harold Robbins' best-seller The Adventurers was reviewed by New York Times, which referred to the production as "a spectacular blast-furnace lulu of human waste". Indeed, Gilbert himself said of the film a few years ago that it was "terrible" and that he regretted having been involved with it. With such a reputation, it's no wonder that even retro movie lovers such as myself have never made the effort to watch the movie. However, the Warner Archive has just re-issued Paramounts original DVD release of the film and, upon receiving the screener, I had enough morbid curiosity to give it a try. How, after all, could a film by a major director and featuring a big all-star cast go so completely wrong? The answer is: it didn't. The Adventurers is not high art, but it doesn't...

#15- Barbarella

Directed by Roger Vadim

The Comic:

What many people don’t realize is that Barbarella is a French science fiction comic book created by Jean-Claude Forest for serialisation in the French magazine V-Magazine in spring 1962. In 1964 Eric Losfeld later published these strips as a stand-alone book, under the title Barbarella. The stand-alone version caused a scandal and became known as the first “adult” comic-book, despite its eroticism being slight. The original comic book version of Barbarella was modelled on Brigitte Bardot. Interesting enough the actress was once married to the director of the 1968 film, Roger Vadim. Barbarella is also mentioned in Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Qui est In Qui est Out”. Bardot at one point in her life also had a romantic relationship with the French singer.

The Movie:

A kitsch cult classic about a 41st-century female astronaut on a mission to find Duran Duran, a scientist who...