Ah, the joys of guilty pleasures. And the joys are many in Stanley Kramer’s THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA. Based on Robert Crichton’s bestselling novel, the 1969 film stars Anthony Quinn as the bumbling wine maker Bombolini, who is elected mayor of his small Italian town as a joke and then...

GENEVIEVE is not a who, it’s a what. A twin-cylinder, 10/12 horsepower Darracq motocar built in Paris in 1904. Found sticking out of a hedge in East London in 1945, the car was rescued from further rust and obscurity by a local bailiff, rebuilt to its original glory, and soon became the star...

For a heathen like me, films with religious overtones are usually best when played for their camp entertainment value, a la THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Something where the spectacle overwhelms anything overtly pious. Personal religious stories tend to come off as preachy and make my skin crawl. So why do...

When do movies about apartheid seem cold and passionless? When you have Richard Attenborough at the helm. Attenborough is an uninspiring director who makes uninspiring films. And, yes, that includes his multi-Oscar-winning GANDHI. After the joke that was A CHORUS LINE, Attenborough returned to dramatic...

I’m such a sap. I truly am. I cry at the drop of a hat. As my best friend has jokingly told me for years, I cry at milk commercials. Whether that makes me a mess or just emotional, I choose to repress it and not dig too deeply internally to figure it all out. On those occasions when I need a really good...

As the world faced a new millennium, it took a British theater director, Sam Mendes, to expose the dirt and secrets beneath the white pickets fences and manicured lawns of suburbia with his the Oscar-winning AMERICAN BEAUTY. With its slick direction, acerbic screenplay by Alan Ball, and pitch-perfect...

CHARIOTS OF FIRE, the sleeper hit of 1981, picked up speed and sprinted towards the finish line in the final laps of awards season. Bolstered by its hit soundtrack, the film emerged victorious, surprisingly winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Based on a true story, Ben Cross and Ian Charleson star...

“Best” is an apt word for THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES. The 1946 film won 7 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Fredric March), Best Director (William Wyler), and another for Hugo Friedhofer’s classic score. The film tells the story of three soldiers (March, Dana Andrews,...

Mark Isham has given all us film score fans an early Christmas present. Few composers would take the time and effort to create suites of their unreleased film scores just for fans. But Isham is not just any composer. Last month, he created an 8-minute suite of his music from the new Werner Herzog/Nicolas...

I will never do a movie again. It is completely wasted and expended music energy that should go into my own work. So said Bernard Herrmann in 1948. Two years later, in the midst of composing his opera of Wuthering Heights, with his CBS Radio conducting gig at an end, and his marriage in the toilet,...