Have You Ever Seen

Our first Best Picture winner in this year's Oscar Month, The Last Emperor, went 9 for 9 at the awards that year. John Lone, Joan Chen and Peter O'Toole are all solid in the starring roles, but there's something fairly soulless and even a little opaque about this spectacular production...especially for a Bernardo Bertolucci film. Bertolucci and his team were the rare Western filmmakers to be allow...

Surprise! Back in January, Ryan posted a solo show talking about Horse Feathers. Well, here's another unexpected, unpromoted show about a movie star from the early days of cinema. Mary Pickford is a legend for business reasons though as much as she is for her films. She was a producer when not many women were AND she created the United Artists studio with Chaplin, Griffith and Fairbanks. Coquette...

This is our 9th Oscars Preview Show and this is one of the few times where we don't have too many bad things to say about the nominees. Bev went easier on Oppenheimer than she did last summer after seeing it. We each have nothing but praise for some of the great (downer) films like Anatomy Of A Fall and The Zone Of Interest. At least the Academy didn't overlook funny flicks because 2 gut-busters (...

Jean-Luc Godard was prolific after he went from reviewing films to making them in the early '60s. He directed a few classics of the French New Wave, many of which are beloved by Sight & Sound voters. In Contempt, bombshell Brigitte Bardot is impossibly beautiful, but she's also quite good at playing passive-aggressive anger. She and the dreamy Italian locations are a treat for the eyes, as her nig...

While not a classic, Mogambo has a lot going for it. They took the production to several countries in Africa to get authentic scenery for this passionate love story. Big stars like Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly do the love triangle thing and John Ford (who had just won his 4th Oscar) is their director. And what these legends of cinema made 70+ years ago is fine. It's just far from marve...

It's President's Day in America, it's Family Day here in Ontario and it's also Black History Month, but it's also "Love In A Word" Month on Have You Ever Seen...and we continue to talk about romantic movies with one-word titles. Sabrina has a tremendous pedigree. Billy Wilder directing Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn and William Holden must have been an easy sell to the moneymen 70 years ago. Thei...

Ernst Lubitsch is one of the directors of the classic era who hasn't stayed in people's minds as much as others have. He's not as revered as, say, Billy Wilder...who happens to be a co-writer of Ninotchka. But Ernst had the famous "Lubitsch Touch", where he was able to effortlessly blend jokes and romance with a good story as well as anybody ever has. The hook here is that the always-serious Greta...

So Woody Allen, huh? One of the most controversial men in show business wasn't always that way...at least not publicly. He made many funny classics back in his salad days. Manhattan is certainly one of them. Woody and Marshall Brickman wrote plenty of great lines and hilarious scenes, plus Gordon Willis' cinematography is fantastic. The story and themes in this complicated love rhombus, however, a...

All of our February podcasts will be about romantic/passionate films with one-word titles...and we begin "Love In A Word Month" with a chat about Arthur. Steve Gordon's blockbuster comedy was the rare laughy performance that won an Oscar. John Gielgud took it home for what is the funniest role in the movie. Dudley Moore, on the other hand, cackles at every joke he makes when he's drunk, although a...

Steven Soderbergh's debut film is the 4th and final selection in this year's "Month Of Bev". Sex, Lies, And Videotape represents career-best performances by Andie MacDowell and Laura San Giacomo, although it was James Spader who got all the raves for his calm frankness. Peter Gallagher has the least-sympathetic and least-dimensional role of the 4 main characters. People are complex, which is a tru...

Not many movies make decorative artwork a sinister part of the story...but The Picture Of Dorian Gray does. Albert Lewin's handsome adaptation of Oscar Wilde's story about a painting that evolves to show the dark deeds of the lead character while he remains young is a popular concept. It's been remade many times. In this 1945 version, Hurd Hatfield's intentionally soulless performance as Dorian is...

Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and the rest of the terrific cast of The Talented Mr. Ripley were all in the middle of a remarkable run of greatness in the late '90s, but this is the thriller that sometimes gets forgotten. Is this Damon's best performance? It's certainly the rare killer he's played...and he's really good at being bad. The boring leech is a top-notch liar...and, oh, there's t...

Hey, it's a surprise podcast! A little bonus magic here in mid-January. Well, it's been more than 10 years since the Marx Brothers have come up on Have You Ever Seen, so they were due. Norman McLeod's football comedy is just as anarchic as Groucho, Chico and Harpo's other red-letter titles were. Trouble is, most of their zany puns and sight gags come across as "more of the same". They're hitting t...

Look at us covering one of the whitest movies ever on MLK Day. Well, it's quite a film that happens to be about many compelling things: lying, cheating and masculinity. It's also legitimately funny. Swedish writer/director Ruben Ostlund has made a career out of filming the uncomfortable and he loves to show people who are trying to save face. In Force Majeure, we've got a marriage on the rocks aft...

Buster Keaton's silent comedies were classics, but they were also action thrillers. He was one of the greatest and gutsiest stuntmen/actors in history. That stuff is phenomenal, so the only real problem with The Navigator is the same as it was in Sherlock Jr last year. Namely, the movie just isn't all that funny. The Navigator's ending sequence has the most laughs and most of the best stunts thoug...

We begin the 9th Annual Month Of Bev by chatting about a cult classic that features punks, Reaganomics and odd automobiles. Repo Man was Alex Cox's debut (Sid And Nancy came 2 years later) and it was also very early in Emilio Estevez's film career. The man who would basically stop acting in motion pictures about 15 years later is just okay here. He's joined in this sci-fi/comedy by veteran charact...

We're in "let's look back at 2023" mode as we discuss our fave flicks of last year (so far) and also answer listeners' emails, tweets and YouTube comments. It wasn't a great 12 months at the movies, although we still have to see a lot of red-letter titles before we can make a final call on that. The writers' and actors' strikes were huge stories that might have long-lasting effects, but apart from...

To wrap up our podcasting year with a record-shattering 77th episode, Ryan is once again on a solo mission to review something that's considered a classic. And while it's always a pleasure to see Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, the  reason to cover The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer is that it represents our first Shirley Temple (Black) flick. She's one of the title characters---you can guess which one---...

We post our final podcast of this year about a Christmas movie a day early, even though The Lion In Winter is only tangentially a Christmas movie at all. James Goldman wrote a complex King Lear story based on real people in director Anthony Harvey's authentic, dirty, unkempt Oscar-winner. Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn lead a fabulous cast (well, except for one person), as they fill the movie...

Not only are we reviewing Christmas movies this month, but Trading Places makes for the 2nd of 3 screwball comedies you will be able to find on this channel by the end of December. And like those other two, John Landis' romp tells a good story, but isn't very funny. Dan Aykroyd was established as a star, but Eddie Murphy was just starting his legendary movie career while Jamie Lee Curtis was makin...

Television marathons helped A Christmas Story become a huge favourite this time of year, but Bob Clark's holiday comedy didn't need to be stuffed down people's throats. It earns the rep of being one of the greatest Christmas movies by being funny and sweet. Jean Shepherd's joyful memories of his own life as a kid growing up about 80 years ago in Indiana offset some of the bad memories, whether it...

We're taking a short break from covering Christmas movies by talking about Arthur Penn's The Miracle Worker. Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke are tremendous as the battling teacher and student. Both won Oscars as Bancroft's Anne Sullivan teaches manners and ASL to Duke's deaf and blind Helen Keller. The real Keller was intelligent, stubborn, ferocious and---disabilities or not---also a bit of a jerk....

Holy moly, the 553rd ice-fish of Have You Ever Seen kicks off the Christmas season as Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau bring their crabby charm to the title characters. But the 2 comedy legends are only Grumpy Old Men with each other. They're quite sweet to everybody else, especially to each other's kids and---most of all---to the new babe in town, Ann-Margret. The love story between her and the 2 o...

The early '40s was a hugely successful time for director Howard Hawks and his Ball Of Fire stars, Barbara Stanwyck & Gary Cooper. This isn't their crowning achievement (partly because it just isn't as funny as other comedies each of them made), but it's fun and the love story is certainly enjoyable. Hawks was talented enough to excel at making movies in nearly every genre, but he was always in his...

Even though John Sturges is one of the most underrated directors of all time, remaking Seven Samurai could have turned out to be a big mistake if it failed. Instead, The Magnificent Seven is fun, cool and exciting...and it has a layer of sadness too. Sadness and desperation have been unintentional themes in our movies this month, actually. Still, it's hard not to make your western cool when you've...