Meander river sentence1/1/2024 Stars: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bose, Barbara Magnolfiĭario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria is the director’s best-loved movie, but it’s also his most atypical work. What begins as another haunted house story ends as a commentary on the history of America: a nation built not just on hard work, but also on blood and not-always-heroic sacrifice. The Changeling may be a showcase for an effortlessly magnetic veteran lead, but it’s also a mystery thriller that engrosses as it frightens. (Indeed, it’s amazing Medak had never even been near the genre before.) Having moved into a new home, a century-old manor also occupied by the restless spirit of a young boy, Scott’s John Russell digs to discover the tale of an institutional cover-up, and of power wielded monstrously in the name of financial gain. Dubbed one of the scariest movies of all time by Martin Scorsese, The Changeling deals the terror out in spades, with Medak playing up the tightening fear of the unknown with the precision of a horror maestro. Scott tempers his natural irascibility to play a melancholy composer grieving for his recently deceased wife and daughter in Peter Medak’s conflation of haunted house movie and supernatural whodunit. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas, John Colicos With a cast of colorful characters and good-natured humor, Stalag 17 somehow takes a horrific premise and mines it for laughs more successfully than one would have thought possible. In comparison with a film like The Great Escape, which would later come along and tell a story ringing with many of the same tropes, albeit without the screwball sense of humor, Stalag 17 is both an escape story and a light mystery, centered around the identity of the German informant who is sabotaging each attempt by the Americans to flee the camp and defy the Germans. It’s William Holden who makes the film click and hum, portraying American airman Sefton as a somewhat sleazy but clever profiteer who figures that if he’s going to spend time in a POW camp, he might as well be an enterprising big shot while he’s there, living as comfortably as he can. Tonally, Billy Wilder’s prisoners of war story is a true dramedy, fitting into an odd post-war space when American cinemagoers were apparently content to laugh at the horrors faced by prisoners, even while being reminded of the deadly results of incarceration, which were obviously even more dire for victims of the Holocaust. Ultimately, Jaws is a great film via memorable characters, but a scary film care of novelty and perfect execution. Likewise with the death of Quint (Robert Shaw), whose mad scramble to avoid those gnashing teeth is the kind of thing that created its very own sub-genre of children’s nightmares. The first time that Brody (Roy Scheider) sees the literal “jaws” of the beast while absentmindedly throwing chum into the water is one of the great, scream-inducing moments in cinema history, and it’s a shock that has rarely been matched in any other shark movie since. Much has been made over the years of how Jaws as a film really benefits from the technical issues that plagued its making the story originally called for more scenes featuring the mechanical shark “Bruce,” but the constantly malfunctioning animatronic forced the director to cut back, which ended up maximizing each appearance’s impact. But regardless of how you’d classify it, there’s no denying that Jaws is anything but brilliant, one of Spielberg’s great populist triumphs, alongside the likes of Jurassic Park and E.T., but leaner and less polished than either. Is Jaws a horror film? For those who worry that it’s “not safe to go back in the water,” then most certainly it is. Stars: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton And it’s why our list of what’s available is so important. A perfect mirror image to Criterion’s well-curated ensemble, Tubi’s shotgun blast of cinema has its merits. Looking for an obscure title, or a well-loved movie from decades ago that simply doesn’t appear on one of the major streamers? Check Tubi. It’s a library that eclipses other streamers, and one supplemented by questionable Tubi Originals like Titanic 666, but despite its difficult learning curve, the sheer selection of movies at hand has helped make Tubi into a surprising go-to for a select kind of cinephile. Their library is massive, with close to 1,000 films available just in the horror genre, but the functionality and ability to browse those films in a logical way leaves much to be desired. As a free, ad-supported streaming service, finding the best movies on Tubi involves one major pro and one major con: Pure scale.
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