E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Cold Sweat turns 50 this year, and is a movie hardly anyone knows or loves. B-movie fetishists are a perverse lot, and I am one of them. I can genuinely revel in a well-made, odd, quirky, forgotten second-rate flick, with few if any pretensions, seeing it with great affection and respect for what it is; whereas many a pretentious, 'bigger picture' can leave me cold. Cold Sweat is actually, in its way, a great film, but because the director Terence Young has almost no auteurist-following, it's been neglected; the reviews it does get are perfunctory and mainly indifferent - it's seen, if at all now, as a toss-offed Charles Bronson actioner, one of the cheap Euro-trash movies he made as his violent vigilante career went supernova. It's out on DVD, and easy to find online. I'd recommend it to any fans of the crime/thriller genre, and, for the reasons I mention below, it is separately fascinating for being an example of how a film can gather incredible talent...

TOXIC MALE GAZES REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT Orson Welles was a magician - not a necromancer - but the joke about resurrecting the dead is in every frame of the Netflix released THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, his best movie, yet. Welles, foremost an artist and a charlatan (he was obsessed with tricks, fakery and illusion throughout his visionary work for stage, radio, and the screen), would have known that nothing is as haunting as the posthumous work. Only the truly great get to come back from the grave. Of course, Welles famously crafted his late-period film-as-process oeuvre and praxis from his inability to get financial backing, and the way his final forays were often left unfinished; after a while, his unmade movies took on more weight and anticipated value than the ones he had completed. Yet even here, the story is faked. Welles always (except in KANE, usually considered his masterpiece) left his work unfinished, more or less - often intentionally, or accidentally. His signature st...

DANGER - SPOILERS AHEAD!!! Logan , the new film by James Mangold , and the tenth outing for the Wolverine character from the Marvel Universe, as played by Hugh Jackman , is receiving a lot of critical praise. Released March 1, the film has been called "the Citizen Kane " of comic book films, and compared favourably to the previous benchmark for quality in this sub-genre, The Dark Knight trilogy, by Christopher Nolan . It shares with that trilogy a gritty realism, a downbeat tone, and serious actors at the top of their game. It is however not an urban picture, but, as every critic has noted, a road movie/Western in its DNA. The cliché is to cite Shane , which the picture does itself, as the blueprint, but this is a red herring, since the actual Western it most resembles is The Searchers - let alone In Cold Blood or T2 . Mangold has co-written the film, at a time of Western darkness (Brexit, the rise of Trump ) and the film opens on a landscape torn from Beckett by ...

TOM FORD FANS On a lighter note - Lord we need one - 2016 was a great year for cinema, popular, commercial, foreign and domestic, art-house and comic-book.  As I was reminded recently, the last time a film took all top 5 Oscars (Best film, director, producer, actor and actress) was 1991 for horror classic  Silence of the Lambs (one would have thought Titanic , but Winslett did not win that year). 26 years later, this could happen again with La La Land - or not, so stiff is the competition.  If they use all ten places, here are the ten films Eyewear thinks the Academy will nominate for Best Picture, based on other prizes, and critical reception. 1. La La Land - the sentimental favourite, and one to beat, for its self-reflexive rescue of the musical; 2. Moonlight - a powerful contender, examining a young boy's life as a black gay person in Miami; 3. Manchester by the Sea - probably shoe in for Affleck as best actor; 4. Jackie - again, Portman would win for...