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Poker Face is a new series written, directed, and produced by Rian Johnson. The Peacock series is the first television series created by the famed filmmaker of the Knives Out film franchise. Starring Natasha Lyonne in the lead role, the mystery thriller series has a lot of talent on and off the camera. Poker Face is a weekly whodunnit mystery drama with Charlie Cale, who can detect lies. So, if you loved the procedural and mystery drama aspect of Poker Face, here are some of the best procedural crime drama shows you should check out next.

Columbo Credit – NBC

Columbo is one of the most iconic procedural crime drama series created by Richard Levinson and William Link. The NBC and ABC series follows the story of Columbo, an LAPD homicide detective who solves some of the most brutal and complex murders in the City of Angels. Columbo stars Peter Falk in the lead role,...

Sylvester Stallone has had a few franchises over the years – Rocky, Rambo, The Expendables – but he also has a film that should have been a franchise starter, but never received any of the sequels it deserved. That’s the 1986 classic Cobra (watch it Here), which also happens to be the movie The Arrow in the Head Show hosts John “The Arrow” Fallon and Lance Vlcek are talking about in the new episode of the series. To find out what they had to say about Cobra, check out the video embedded above!

Directed by George P. Cosmatos from a screenplay by Sylvester Stallone (which was apparently loosely based on the novel Fair Game by Paula Gosling), Cobra has the following synopsis: Los Angeles policeman Lt. Marion “Cobra” Cobretti finds himself at the center of a spate of murders carried out by a secret society called New Order: killers who select...

John Sturges’ Road Show comedy western has more in common with 1941 than The Magnificent Seven, but Kino has MGM’s new remaster and the visual result is spectacular. The Ultra Panavision 70 epic is still a favorite of fans of out-of-control Hollywood filmmaking. Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, Jim Hutton, Pamela Tiffin and a huge cast lead the charge for a convoy of frontier whisky. It’s all in a fine spirit of madcap fun. . . so where are the big laughs?

The Hallelujah Trail

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1965 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 156 165 min. / Street Date December 13, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, Jim Hutton, Pamela Tiffin, Donald Pleasence, Brian Keith, Martin Landau, John Anderson, Tom Stern, Robert J. Wilke, Dub Taylor, Whit Bissell, Helen Kleeb, Val Avery, Hope Summers, John Dehner (narrator).

Cinematography: Robert Surtees

Art Direction: Carey Odell

Costumes: Edith Head

Film Editor: Ferris Webster

Original Music: Elmer Bernstein...

Lewis John Carlino’s family-oriented Mafia tale was filmed four years before The Godfather: Kirk Douglas is a loose-cannon capo who bosses his own brother Alex Cord and won’t listen when his fellow kingpins talk about modernization. Irene Papas and Susan Strasberg are married to the mob, while veteran hoods Luther Adler and Eduardo Ciannelli provide the menacing atmosphere. Director Martin Ritt was supposedly not thrilled with the project yet it’s a polished, involving crime-time drama set both in New York City and Palermo, Sicily.

The Brotherhood

Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] #119

1968 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 96 min. / Street Date April 27, 2022 / Available from / £34.95

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Alex Cord, Irene Papas, Luther Adler, Susan Strasberg, Murray Hamilton, Eduardo Ciannelli, Joe De Santis, Connie Scott, Val Avery, Val Bisoglio, Alan Hewitt, Barry Primus, Michele Cimarosa, Louis Badolati.

Cinematography: Boris Kaufman

Art Director: Tambi Larsen

Film Editor: Frank Bracht

Original Music: Lalo Schifrin

Written...

By Lee Pfeiffer

Russian Roulette (originally titled Kill Kosygin!) starts out promisingly enough but ultimately ends up being unsatisfying and misguided. Produced by Elliott Kastner, who was an old hand at making good, populist entertainment, the production was shot entirely in Vancouver. George Segal plays a renegade cop (were there any other kind in the 1970s?) who has been suspended from the local police force for various infractions. Suddenly, he is recruited by Canadian secret intelligence to help thwart a reputed plot to assassinate Soviet Premier Kosygin, who is due to arrive in a matter of days for a high profile conference. Segal learns that he is being set up in an elaborate and confusing plot that involves traitorous Kgb agents who want to kill their own premier in order to prevent him from initiating an era of detente with the West. Their plan involves kidnapping a local dissident (Val Avery...

One of the best yet least seen of John Sturges’ westerns couples a fine screenplay with strong star perfs and superb direction: the straightforward story builds tension throughout. Kirk Douglas is a sheriff out for both justice and revenge and Anthony Quinn is the he-bull rancher who stands in his way: the guilty party is Quinn’s son. It looks sensational in VistaVision, with a fine music score by Dimitri Tiomkin — it’s a pleasure all the way through, with strong support from Carolyn (swoon) Jones, Earl Holliman, Brian Hutton and Brad Dexter.

Last Train from Gun Hill

Region-free Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] 101

1959 / Color / 1:78 widescreen (VistaVision) / 95 min. / Street Date December 29, 2021 / Available from Imprint and Amazon / 39.95

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Carolyn Jones, Earl Holliman, Brad Dexter, Brian G. Hutton, Ziva Rodann, Bing Russell, Val Avery, Walter Sande, John Anderson, Dabbs Greer, Ty Hardin, Glenn Strange, Julius Tannen, Sid Tomack.

Cinematography:...

“Come on, come on, I’d love it — don’t hang back!” dares Gloria Swenson, brandishing a gun at three mobsters that know she means business. Gena Rowlands is electric as a tough New York ex- gangland moll who finds that her maternal instincts make her deadlier than the male. John Cassavetes’ commercial crowd-pleaser is also a smart, sassy gangland mini-classic.

Gloria

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1980 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 123 min. / Street Date August 21, 2018 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95

Starring: Gena Rowlands, Buck Henry, John Adames, Julie Carmen, Lupe Garnica, Jessica Castillo, Basilio Franchina, Val Avery, Tom Noonan.

Cinematography: Fred Schuler

Film Editor: George C. Villaseñor

Original Music: Bill Conti

Produced by Sam Shaw

Written and Directed by John Cassavetes

Do you have a list of movies that you’ll watch again, just to enjoy a particular actor’s performance? Gena Rowlands is one of those people that pull you in.

Blown up to Road Show spectacular dimensions, a fairly modest idea for a comedy western became something of a career Waterloo for director John Sturges. But it’s still a favorite of fans thrilled by fancy 70mm-style presentations. A huge cast led by Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, Jim Hutton and Pamela Tiffin leads the charge on a whisky-soaked madcap chase. It’s all in a fine spirit of fun. . . so where are the big laughs?

The Hallelujah Trail

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1965 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 155 min. / Street Date February 27, 2018 / available through the Olive Films website / 24.95

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, Jim Hutton, Pamela Tiffin, Donald Pleasence, Brian Keith, Martin Landau, John Anderson, Tom Stern, Robert J. Wilke, Dub Taylor, Whit Bissell, Helen Kleeb, Val Avery, Hope Summers, John Dehner.

Cinematography: Robert Surtees

Film Editor: Ferris Webster

Original Music: Elmer Bernstein

Written by John Gay from the novel by William Gulick

Executive...

What are two individualistic, highly motivated movie stars supposed to do when faced with an unimaginative studio system eager to misuse their talents? Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen collaborate with a great writer, director and producer for an urban romance with an eye on the sexual double standard. It’s a hybrid production: a gritty drama that’s also a calculated career move.

Love with the Proper Stranger

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1963 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 100 min. / Street Date September 19, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Natalie Wood, Steve McQueen, Edie Adams, Tom Bosley, Herschel Bernardi, Harvey Lembeck, Agusta Ciolli, Nina Varela, Marilyn Chris, Richard Dysart, Arlene Golonka, Tony Mordente, Nobu McCarthy, Richard Mulligan, Vic Tayback, Dyanne Thorne, Val Avery.

Cinematography: Milton Krasner

Film Editor: Aaron Stell

Original Music: Elmer Bernstein

Written by Arnold Schulman

Produced by Alan J. Pakula

Directed by Robert Mulligan

1963’s Love with the Proper Stranger is...

Barns are a-burning, Paul Newman is recommended to Joanne Woodward as ‘a big stud horse’ and Lee Remick oozes sexuality all over Martin Ritt’s CinemaScope screen. William Faulkner may be the literary source, but this tale of ambition in the family of yet another southern Big Daddy is given the faux Tennessee Williams treatment — it’s a grand soap opera with a fistful of great stars having a grand time.

The Long, Hot Summer

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1958 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 117 min. / Street Date August 14, 2017 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store 29.95

Starring: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa, Orson Welles, Lee Remick, Angela Lansbury, Richard Anderson

Cinematography: Joseph Lashelle

Art Direction: Maurice Ransford, Lyle R. Wheeler

Film Editor: Louis R. Loeffler

Original Music: Alex North

Written by Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr. from stories and a novel by William Faulkner

Produced by Jerry Wald

Directed by Martin Ritt

Time...

“I don’t blame you. When I was your age, I was knockin’ ’em off left and right; but I never did it with nobody’s daughter.”

The Wanderers (1979) screens Friday December 16th through Sunday December 18th at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood). The movie starts at 7:30 all three evenings.

The Bronx, 1963. The 50’s style greaser gang the Wanderers find themselves becoming obsolete as the world changes all around them. The beginning of the Vietnam war and the assassination of President Kennedy signify the end of innocence while these lovably macho and rugged Italian-American lugs deal with gang fights, racial conflicts, finishing high school, and the awkward, yet inevitable transition from adolescence to adulthood. With the 1979 film The Wanderers, based on Richard Price’s cult novel, Director/co-writer Philip Kaufman delivered a vivid, funny, moving and sometimes even surreal evocation of a magical period in time. He...

In the early '70s Walter Matthau excelled in three powerful cops 'n' robbers movies; the second sees him as a tough, laconic San Francisco detective charged with an impossible task -- running down a machine gun mass murderer, with no clues and no living witnesses. The Laughing Policeman Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1973 / Color / 1:85 enhanced widescreen / 112 min. / Street Date October 18, 2016 / available through Kl Studio Classics / 29.95 Starring Walter Matthau, Bruce Dern, Louis Gossett Jr., Albert Paulsen, Anthony Zerbe, Val Avery, Cathy Lee Crosby, Mario Gallo, Joanna Cassidy, Shirley Ballard, William Hansen, Paul Koslo, Louis Guss, Clifton James, Gregory Sierra, Warren Finnerty, Matt Clark, Joseph Bernard, Leigh French, Anthony Costello. Cinematography David M. Walsh Film Editor Bob Wyman Original Music Charles Fox Written by Thomas Rickman from the novel by Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo Produced and Directed by Stuart Rosenberg

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Viewers that like Walter Matthau in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three...

By Lee Pfeiffer 

The good news is that Timeless Video is releasing multiple films in one DVD package. The bad news is that one of these releases, although featuring two highly-watchable leading men, presents two stinkers. Love and Bullets is a 1979 Charles Bronson starrer that Roger Ebert appropriately described at the time as "an assemblyline potboiler". The film initially showed promise. Originally titled Love and Bullets, Charlie, the movie had John Huston as its director. However, Huston left after "creative differences" about the concept of the story and its execution on screen. The absurdity of losing a director as esteemed as Huston might have been understandable if the resulting flick wasn't such a mess. However, one suspects that, whatever the conceptual vision Huston had for the movie may have been, it must have been superior to what ultimately emerged. Stuart Rosenberg, the competent director of Cool Hand Luke took over...

Stars: Bobby Darin, Stella Stevens, Everett Chambers, Nick Dennis, Vince Edwards, Val Avery, Marilyn Clark, James Joyce, Rupert Crosse | Written by John Cassavetes, Richard Carr | Directed by John Cassavetes

Ghost (Darin), is an idealistic musician who would rather play in the park to the birds and at other small time gigs than compromise himself by going big time. For his band mates however, a little bit of fame wouldn’t go a miss. But when Ghost falls for a girl called Jess who he meets at a party (Stevens), she comes between him and his band members. Splitting off from the group and abandoning the life he once knew, he sets off on a search for fame and leaves his dreams behind.

Too Late Blues is another entry in the Masters of Cinema Series, a film made in 1961, filmed in black and white and directed by John Cassavetes. From the title,...

Humphrey Bogart movies: ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ ‘High Sierra’ (Image: Most famous Humphrey Bogart quote: ‘The stuff that dreams are made of’ from ‘The Maltese Falcon’) (See previous post: “Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall Movies.”) Besides 1948, 1941 was another great year for Humphrey Bogart — one also featuring a movie with the word “Sierra” in the title. Indeed, that was when Bogart became a major star thanks to Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. In the former, Bogart plays an ex-con who falls in love with top-billed Ida Lupino — though both are outacted by ingénue-with-a-heart-of-tin Joan Leslie. In the latter, Bogart plays Dashiel Hammett’s private detective Sam Spade, trying to discover the fate of the titular object; along the way, he is outacted by just about every other cast member, from Mary Astor’s is-she-for-real dame-in-distress to Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nominee Sydney Greenstreet. John Huston...

The “adult” Western – as it would come to be called – was a long time coming. A Hollywood staple since the days of The Great Train Robbery (1903), the Western offered spectacle and action set against the uniquely American milieu of the Old West – a historical period which, at the dawn of the motion picture industry, was still fresh in the nation’s memory. What the genre rarely offered was dramatic substance.

Early Westerns often adopted the same traditions of the popular Wild West literature and dime novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries producing, as a consequence, highly romantic, almost purely mythic portraits the Old West. Through the early decades of the motion picture industry, the genre went through several creative cycles, alternately tilting from fanciful to realistic and back again. By the early sound era, and despite such serious efforts as The Big Trail (1930) and The Virginian (1929), Hollywood Westerns were,...

Faces (1968) Direction and screenplay: John Cassavetes Cast: John Marley, Gena Rowlands, Lynn Carlin, Fred Draper, Seymour Cassel, Val Avery Oscar Movies Gena Rowlands, John Marley, Faces After playing Mia Farrow's husband in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), John Cassavetes reportedly threw the money he made as an actor into the finishing touches on Faces, a personal project he had begun filming in 1966. Cassavetes spent months (some sources say a couple of years) editing the film into a "manageable" six hours, and eventually into its final 130 minutes. Silent-film maverick Erich von Stroheim would have been proud of him — at least in regard to Faces' (initial) length and to Cassavetes' committed auteurship. Now, would the irascible Stroheim have approved of the frequently inaudible dialogue, sloppy editing, poor lighting, careless camera placement, and faux-naturalistic acting? Probably not. Shot in 16mm — that looks like poorly developed Super 8 — black and white, Faces...

It’s got big hair, car chases, one-liners and, erm, robots. Could Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra be the quintessential 80s action flick…?

Cobra could have been another big franchise for Sylvester Stallone, a third panel in a macho, blockbusting triptych that already included Rambo and Rocky.

A chaotic action thriller that saw Sly reunited with First Blood Part II director George Pan Cosmatos (though legend has it, of course, that Stallone ghost-directed that hit, not Cosmatos), Cobra did respectable business on its release in 1986, earning an estimated worldwide gross of $160m on a $25m budget. That’s less money than the first Rocky movie managed to make, but more than the first Rambo flick, First Blood.

There’s a major difference between Cobra and Rocky or First Blood though: the latter films were largely applauded by critics, while Cobra was torn apart. And unlike some denigrated 80s flicks, Cobra hasn’t,...

Sitting between the uneven Husbands and the economic beauty of A Woman Under the Influence, Minnie and Moskowitz was John Cassavetes sixth time directing a feature and like most of his work he does so with confidence and a singular vision.

Minnie (Gena Rowlands) is a museum curator, attractive and reasonably well off. Her love life isn’t too good though and after the man she is seeing, the already married Jim (John Cassavetes), cruelly dumps her in front of his son she is immediately set up on a disastrous blind date. Following this blind date debacle, a particularly amusing scene featuring Val Avery as the hapless suitor Zelmo, Minnie runs into Seymour Moskowitz.

Whilst Seymour might not seem on the surface like much of a catch, his own mother points out that “he parks cars for a living!”, he is doggedly persistent and clearly infatuated with Minnie. So begins their relationship,...

Val Avery, a popular character actor of stage and screen, has died at age 85. The New York City resident passed away in his Greenwich Village apartment. Avery was a familiar face to all movie goers in the 60s and 70s. Some of his roles were bit parts, but others were more prominent. He played the corset salesman whose determination to see an Indian get buried with dignity on Boot Hill sets up the first action confrontation in The Magnificent Seven. In the 1971 film The Anderson Tapes,Avery played the dumb but brutal racist thug 'Socks'. For more on his life and career click here...

Chicago – Entries number 251 and number 252 in the most important and impressive series of DVDs in the history of the format, The Criterion Collection, come from the same influential writer/director, one of the godfathers of the independent film industry, John Cassavetes. Both are worthwhile additions to any serious film collector’s shelf.

DVD Rating: 4.5/5.0 The first of the pair is the half-century old “Shadows,” Cassavetes’ directorial debut. As the credit so perfectly says “Improvised/Directed by John Cassavetes”. These visionary films were the forerunner of the American independent film movement - creative people getting together with a camera to create art.

Shadows was released on DVD on February 17th, 2009.

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Criterion Collection Those creative people in “Shadows” were headed by Lelia Goldoni and Anthony Ray. Goldoni plays a character of the same name, a light-skinned black woman living in New York City with her two brothers.