I *almost* got Drummonditis.

I think Bulldog Drummond (1929) is a good movie, with some really great touches. At its best moments it pre-figures both The 39 Steps and James Bond, with Ronald Colman's suave, but reasonably psychotic, Drummond a great lead to follow. Colman was Oscar nominated for this (alongside his performance in Condemned), and he should have won for the strangulation scene alone. What a moment!

Claud Allister plays Bulldog Drummond's sidekick Algy like a sexually rapacious Jacob…

I had a quietly fantastic time with A Samurai in Time. It is a high-concept time travel film, where Kosaka Shinzaemon, an Aizu samurai lived in Edo era, is struck by lightning and inexplicably transported to 2007 Japan. He finds work as a stunt performer specializing in being killed in the dying jidaigek genre. Then, he receives a major role offer from movie star Kyoichiro Kazami.

The film has two distinct acts. The first act is a fish-out-of-water comedy where Makiya Yamaguchi…

American Gigolo is another of Paul Schrader's "God's lonely man" films. His quartet being Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and The Walker. They are a fascinating set of films, as much for their flaws, as for their successes. They are character studies of opaque, egotistical demons, increasingly pathetic and less dangerous with age. They mirror Schrader himself, and his own career. American Gigolo is the second of quartet and the first directed by Schrader. The film is built around…

Warren Beatty's Reds has to be considered perhaps the most ambitious, frankly crazy, film released by mainstream Hollywood. It is, in 1981, a sympathetic, if critical, look at the 1917 Russian Revolution. The film focuses on the life and career of John Reed, the journalist and writer who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. It mixes the personal and the political, spending a good deal of time looking at Reed's relationship with Louise Bryant (the amazing Diane Keaton, more…