Film 101: Blood Simple (1984) at Real Art Ways

Film 101: Shadows & Gunpowder, a study of Film Noir In the first film of brothers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, M. Emmett Walsh plays Visser, an unscrupulous private eye hired by Texas bar owner Marty (Dan Hedaya) to murder Marty’s faithless wife Abby (Frances McDormand) and her paramour, Ray (John Getz), one of Marty’s employees. But Visser is no more up-front with Marty than with anyone else; he makes some slight modifications of the original plan so that it…

Film 101: Shadows & Gunpowder, a study of Film Noir Gumshoe Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) is hired by the oafish Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) to track down his former girlfriend. He’s also hired to accompany an effeminate playboy buy back some jewels. When the exchange results in the playboy’s murder, Marlowe can’t leave the case alone, and soon discovers it’s related to Malloy’s. As he gets drawn deeper into a complex web of intrigue by a mysterious blonde (Claire Trevor),…

Woody Allen blurs the the boundaries between the real and unreal in this unique comic fantasy. The scene is a small town in the mid-1930s. Trapped in a dead-end job and an abusive marriage, Cecelia (Mia Farrow) regularly seeks refuge in the local movie house. She becomes so enraptured by the latest attraction, an RKO screwball comedy called The Purple Rose of Cairo, that she returns to the theatre day after day. During one of these visits, the film’s main…

Although he was not the first choice to direct it, the hit black comedy MASH established Robert Altman as one of the leading figures of Hollywood’s 1970s generation of innovative and irreverent young filmmakers. Scripted by Hollywood veteran Ring Lardner, Jr., this war comedy details the exploits of military doctors and nurses at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the Korean War. Between exceptionally gory hospital shifts and countless rounds of martinis, wisecracking surgeons Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper…

The film was based on the German comedy Fanfaren der Liebe (1951), in which two musicians dress in drag to join an all-girls band and end up falling for the lead singer. But aside from the central plot elements, Some Like it Hot does not suffer from a lack of originality. Rather, it takes an already clever premise and injects some of the finest writing ever done. This time, it’s 1929 Chicago, and saxophonist Joe (Tony Curtis) and bass-player Jerry…

Arguably the Marx Brothers’ funniest film, this comedy masterpiece contains several famous scenes, including the hilarious mirror sequence. A wealthy widow offers financial aid to the bankrupt country of Freedonia on condition that Rufus T. Firefly be made leader. But his chaotic, inept regime bumbles into war with neighboring Sylvania.

This 1924 silent classic is not as well known as it should be. Keaton plays a young man who works as a projectionist and janitor in the local movie theater. (He’s also reading a book about how to become a detective.) Wrongly accused of theft — his romantic rival stole a pocket watch from his girlfriend’s house and pawned it, then framed Keaton so her father sends him away in disgrace — he returns to his job and falls asleep…

Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory is among the most powerful antiwar films ever made. A fiery Kirk Douglas stars as a World War I French colonel who goes head-to-head with the army’s ruthless top brass when his men are accused of cowardice after being unable to carry out an impossible mission. This haunting, exquisitely photographed dissection of the military machine in all its absurdity and capacity for dehumanization (a theme Kubrick would continue to explore throughout his career) is assembled…

This unorthodox dream western by Robert Altman may be the most radically beautiful film to come out of the New American Cinema. It stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as two newcomers to the raw Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, who join forces to provide the miners with a superior kind of brothel experience. The appearance of representatives of a powerful mining company with interests of its own, however, threatens to be the undoing of their plans. With…

1990 | Drama | Persian with English subtitles | Dir. Abbas Kiarostami Plot: This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event–the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf–as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. Conversation: In this classic of world cinema, a cinephile pretends to be well-known Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and is eventually caught. The…