Have You Ever Seen

Jewel once asked "who will save your soul" and when Morfydd Clark made Saint Maud with Rose Glass, she answered enthusiastically "I will!" We've got one of those "reality vs. fantasy" storylines again as a feverishly devout Catholic deals with her delusions (if they ARE that) while battling with her dying patient (Jennifer Ehle). Glass was making her directorial debut and, while her movie isn't bo...

As Canadians eat bird on Thanksgiving and Americans eat Italians on Columbus Day (correct?), Have You Ever Seen just goes all listicle on ya again. I've got a Top 20 countdown for you to, well, chew on. Here are the 5 greatest debuts by an actor in a horror movie and the 15 greatest directorial debuts in horror. Okay, it's lot more than just those 20. These things are fluid. In any event, this lis...

Inclement weather is heading your way! We discover in this 689th edition of Have You Ever Seen that there are angry, dead mariners on a boat surrounded by fog...and they're out for revenge on the residents of a small coastal town 100 years later. Well-made though this film is, it's definitely lesser John Carpenter, coming out right in the middle of his brilliant Halloween/Escape/Thing run. His hor...

In Jezebel, Bette Davis plays a sassy Southern belle who pushes prudish fiancé Henry Fonda away. And it's all over a red dress. Jezebel is a movie about manners, propriety and stubbornness in the Antebellum South (courteous though they are, they DO have plenty of slaves) with the looming threat of Yellow Fever. William Wyler's romance in and around New Orleans isn't an all-time classic, but Bette...

Repeat after me and say it with the coolest lisp in cinema: here beginneth the 687th Have You Ever Seen podcast. The Untouchables is one Brian De Palma's most-successful films is also the first one of his to be discussed around here in 9 years...and, after Carrie, only the 2nd in total. And he was great at violent gangster flicks. It's still the days of Prohibition in America and Al Capone runs th...

A new era begins in this 686th edition of Have You Ever Seen as Ryan talks about David Lynch's mainstream breakout after Eraserhead got him noticed by this film's executive producer, Mel Brooks. The Elephant Man stars Oscar nominee John Hurt in the title role and Anthony Hopkins as his sympathetic doctor. Unusual for Lynch, his B&W biographical character piece doesn't have sex, gory violence or ba...

This was supposed to be the slot for Bev & Ryan to talk about David Lynch's The Elephant Man, but that episode has been pre-empted. Instead, this 685th edition of Have You Ever Seen has Ryan talking alone about a major life change that greatly affects this podcast. Check this one out for those details, but also note that all my talk about "maybe" covering The Elephant Man next Monday was unfounded...

Ryan's got a Friday solo show today with this 684th edition of Have You Ever Seen. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a zany rom-com with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy playing a likable husband & wife who move themselves & their daughters from NYC out to the country. And their house turns out to be a disaster. This film has been acclaimed over the decades, even though it's more congenial than it i...

It's Labour Day, sure, but we're working the podcast anyway as we talk about critically-disliked films made by 14 outstanding actors. We put the names of 50 living thespians in a hat, then pulled out 7 names apiece and talked up 1 movie of each of theirs that Rotten Tomatoes gave a bad review. A splat, if you will. Some of the names in this 683rd edition of Have You Ever Seen include Ford, Foxx, S...

Our summer of podcasting comes to an end with this 682nd episode about The Martian, where we talk about Matt Damon having a years-long space adventure alone on the red planet. He's left behind by his crew and has to use his wits & botany talent to survive until they can come back for him...with plenty of help from the geniuses at NASA back on Earth. The optimism in Andy Weir's novel translates to...

Reuniting the Titanic team of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (not to mention Kathy Bates) was something audiences had wanted for more than a decade. Maybe they didn't expect another doomed romance that was also bleak and sad. Revolutionary Road is about middle-class ennui, quiet desperation and the cruelty of hope. And the stars are terrific playing unextraordinary people yearning for somethin...

Mr. And Mrs. Smith was a hit action comedy that started out as a vehicle for Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie. What director Doug Liman and his team couldn't have known going in was that the "Brangelina" phenomenon would overwhelm their movie and be the start of a passionate, but ultimately controversial real-life relationship and marriage. We of course discussed all that gossip in episode #680, but we...

Holidays often mean we post a listicle...and so the Civic Holiday brings about our breakdown of the American Film Institute's greatest movies that DIDN'T make their 1998 or 2007 Top 100 lists. So there's no Citizen Kane, Godfather, Jaws action here. These are nominees that were shunned both times, such as Dog Day Afternoon, Ghostbusters, L.A. Confidential...and so many more. Bev listed her #100 do...

Marilyn Monroe was a gorgeous blonde, the kind who made men's tongues hit the floor. She also played innocent, cute and dumb as well as anyone. Case in point, The Seven Year Itch is where that famous image of her skirt being blown up while she's standing over a subway grate comes from. And the cinematic icon aced all of those angles in Billy Wilder's comedy. Yes, the director had to compromise and...

The least-well-known title we'll be covering in this month of mirth-filled movies is Tom Di Cillo's sharp satire about the stresses of independent filmmaking. But those who aren't aware of it should know that Living In Oblivion will bust some guts. Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener are terrific in the lead roles as the director and his temperamental star, but James Le Gros hilariously steals the...

This second week in Have You Ever Seen's month of funny films has Ryan covering the more sweet than hilarious WWII war comedy Mister Roberts. The legendary director John Ford and his co-director Mervyn LeRoy had a strong cast to work with, although Ford's mean-spirited temper comes up often in this episode. Henry Fonda is not at his very best in the title role, but he's still awfully good. James C...

Put out a bowl of memberberries because episode #675 of Have You Ever Seen is a fond reminiscence of the greatest parody of disaster thrillers ever made. Airplane is still the crowning achievement of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team who made many other funny farce flicks like Top Secret and The Naked Gun. What Team ZAZ perfected their first time out as directors was to make an uproarious comedy out...

While Sofia Coppola's second film, Lost In Translation, remains her finest, the '70s-set The Virgin Suicides was a good start to her writing and directing career. Her debut is far from perfect, although it's lyrical, haunting and it looks fantastic. Now, we had issues with Coppola's loyalty to Jeffrey Eugenides' book, especially the narration and the inconsistent use of 5 boys across the street. S...

Caring crusaders are almost their own movie genre and one of the most successful films about such is Erin Brockovich. Steven Soderbergh had a huge year in 2000 with Traffic and also this biopic, turning both into blockbuster Oscar-winners. He won the award for directing Traffic while Julia Roberts won her own gold trophy for playing the brash, real-life, legal assistant who works day and night to...

Judy Holliday unexpectedly won the 1950 Best Actress Oscar instead of Bette Davis in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd, but the Judes IS outstandingly funny in Born Yesterday. George Cukor's classic comedy actually gets funnier as it goes along, as the likable ditz Holliday grows curious about history, politics, word origins...and bettering herself. Broderick Crawford plays her uncou...

We're entering a stretch of Have You Ever Seen reviews where the performances in the movies in question won the star a Best Actress Oscar. Sissy Spacek took it home 45 years ago for her transformation into the Coal Miner's Daughter...aka the First Lady Of Country Music, Miss Loretta Lynn. Spacek wasn't alone though. Tommy Lee Jones as her husband Doo and Beverly D'Angelo as Patsy Cline shine too....

The documentary that won the Academy Award in 2015 is the topic of #670 of Have You Ever Seen. Asif Kapadia and his team look at the tremendous singer Amy Winehouse through archival footage and many new interviews with those in her circle, but the film sorely misses having these obscure people being shown on camera. Who's who?! We were also critical of how Kapadia's approach isn't as in-depth as h...

Sense And Sensibility is Ang Lee's take on an English tale of manners, money and matrimony. The Taiwanese director was an outsider to this world, obviously, but he also brought a formality and desperate longing to this project. Lead actress Emma Thompson won an Oscar for her adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel. And it's a good role, doing the buttoned-down thing she did so well back in the '...

After more than 12 years of doing this podcast, it was high time for us to review something by French director Jean-Pierre Melville. Le Samourai was his (and his star, Alain Delon's) homage to '40s Hollywood noir. This crime classic is about Delon's passive hitman, who's either too cool for school...or just doesn't care. In this one-Ryan show, the talk gets into  relating to Delon's loner mindset...

On Mission: Impossible weekend, it seemed right for Have You Ever Seen to feature a flick all about an impossible mission to climb a cliff, get inside a Greek island fortress and blow up some enormous German blasters. Our 667th episode talks about that trek, but also about revenge and wartime honour. Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn and David Niven lead a fine cast in The Guns Of Navarone, as they and...