Road Movies

It's a human trait to want to pick up and start over somewhere else.  Or wander aimlessly without having to commit to a place (or anything for that matter) for very long.  One of my favorite of all types of films is the "road movie", as these feelings of freedom and adventure are at these films' very core.

In the mood for a little wandering, here are a few of my favorite road movies:

Stranger Than Paradise.  Jim Jarmusch.  1984.
Alice in the Cities.  Wim Wenders.  1974.
The Passenger.  Michelangelo Antonioni.  1975.
Kings of the Road.  Wim Wenders.  1976.
In the White City.  Alain Tanner.  1983.

Favorite (four), part nine

Just like in my other eight posts thus far in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing.  I'm trying right now to take in almost a film a day.  Most have been first-time viewings.  And most I have been glad to finally see, but only very few have stayed with me.  This series is my filter for those (and hopefully one or two of these will be good to someone else, too).

Frank Borzage's Moonrise
The strongest film yet I've seen from Borzage.  It's melodramatic, but the casting's perfect, and Borzage's ability to tell a story psychologically is crisp and effective.  It's a near masterpiece, ambitious, extremely well-conceived, controlled, and almost always achieving its intent.  

Abel Ferrara's Chelsea on the Rocks

Made with Ferrara's typical deceptively unpolished style, a strong documentary from the ever probing auteur.  The material is perfect for Ferrara as he's able to filter the seediness of the Chelsea into his own debauched yet weirdly humanistic perspective.  Certainly not for everyone, but fans of Ferrara will feel his work continues to evolve and excel.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Un Flic

Melville's final film is not at the same level of his two previous and, in my opinion, two strongest films, Army of Shadows and Le Cercle Rouge.  But it still shows off the director's ability for bringing an incredibly unique approach and attitude to the crime film.  Zooms abound, while also on display are the director's uncanny interest in the human gaze and most minute details of a crime.  Of particular interest, the entire sequence where a helicopter helps with the heist of a moving train.  

Wim Wenders' Tokyo-Ga

This exploration almost feels like a Godard or Marker essay.  An unorthodox, somewhat meandering doc that seems like essential viewing for any strong fan of Ozu's work.  Wenders mourns cinema's loss of one of its most special practitioners.  Using Ozu's favorite city, Tokyo, to look into how the world has changed since Ozu's disappearance, Wenders also spends time with some of Ozu's closest collaborators.  

1982: The Thing (John Carpenter)

1982: The Thing (John Carpenter)
Let me start by admitting that I really don't know this year or next year's film all that well.  I've only seen each of them once, and it's been many years.  But I'll do my best to recollect.  

I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana where it would only snow and stick about once every five years.  So snow was always a major event and a magical time.  I've decided that this experience has spilled over into my film-watching and I now have a real affinity for films with snow. Fargo, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nightfall, and On Dangerous Ground all rank among my favorites. And of course all contain some scenes with snow.  

I don't want to undersell The Thing as simply being a film that has snow so therefore I like it.  It also features one of my favorite Kurt Russell performances, a contained dread similar to what Ridley Scott provided in the first Alien, and one of the most sustained and beautiful cold color palettes of any movie I've ever seen.  

I don't know Carpenter's body of work as well as I would like.  But this one, along with Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13, definitely make me want to do something about that very soon.

Other contenders for 1982: I still have some things to see from this year.  These include: David Cronenberg's Videodrome, Sidney Lumet's The Verdict, Eric Rohmer's Le beau mariage, Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, and Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama.  I need to revisit Costa-Gavras' Missing as it's been too long since I've seen it to know where it'd place on this list. From this year, I really like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.  And my closest runner-up is Wim Wenders' The State of Things.

1/9/11 I watched Jean-Luc Godard's Passion.  Definitely part of his latter, more difficult period.  Not as user-friendly, not as readily accessible.  Godard proves though that he has eye for nature that's as strong as anyone's, and his feel for the female body is really special here.  But it's still too enigmatic for me to fully connect and embrace.

4/27/11 I watched Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist.  It still holds up pretty well, and is as interesting to me as a slice of life in the early eighties as it is anything else.  The casting's quite good (I'll admit a slight crush on JoBeth Williams), and the opening act very strong.  Just didn't always completely hold my attention.  

5/16/11 I watched Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander.  Some of it is among the most lush and sensual filmmaking I've ever seen, and these sections are quite tremendous.  The more harsh, ascetic Bergman justaposes though in a way that I find more detracting than fulfilling.

8/23/11 I watched Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.  Part of that unique genre, "extreme film", along with works such as Apocalypse Now and Sorcerer.  These films all show filmmakers willing to travel to dangerous lengths to paint unprecedented canvases and test their own abilities as storytellers and dream purveyors.  Herzog's film might feel slightly disjointed at times.  But the scope at which he is working and the heart that drives both him and Fitzcarraldo allow this film to rise memorably above any shortcomings.  A classic of the genre, and probably about as personal as Herzog's work can ever be.  

3/2/15 I watched Sidney Lumet's The Verdict.  My first-time viewing of this very well respected courtroom pic proved to be mostly memorable even if I was reminded again of my lukewarm feelings about Lumet as a filmmaker.  I like his approach as an invisible director and working with a fairly intelligent script and a mostly top-level cast, Lumet lends the courthouse genre intelligence and art.  This film feels a bit elliptical and hazy like some of the great American work of the seventies yet I always have this feeling that either Lumet is too restrained to reach the great artistic heights of some of his peers or too proud to give us the cheap thrills of the standard Hollywood courtroom pic.  And so what we end up with is something in between that is never entirely satisfying as transcendent art or entertainment.

5/23/15 I watched Ron Howard's Night Shift.  What is most surprising is how loose and playful this early Howard work is compared to where he would venture later on in his career.  Keaton is clearly hungry and this is a star performance.  But the entire thing just feels kind of like a throwaway. 

1/10/16 I watched Robert Altman's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.  A very interesting film when considered among the rest of Altman's body of work.  It is wistful, dreamy, and full of Altman's unique stylings such as slow zooms and multi-track dialogue.  I have never seen his early James Dean film but I find it interesting that he made two films that revolve somewhat around the young actor.  Feels like a final film, like a Gertrud or a Rio Lobo, extraordinarily confident, staunchly uncommercial and focused on the past while doubtful of any future.  

3/8/16 I watched Joe Layton's Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip.  Nowhere near as transcendent or funny as Pryor's 1979 concert film.  This show finds Pryor post-freebasing event where he almost burned himself to death.  Apparently he did this show twice, the previous night was hailed as his comeback and it fell flat so he invited everyone back for free the following night.  Pryor still has the gift of gab and his genius reveals itself intermittently but anyone really wanting to know his true greatness should start with the '79 standup.

9/21/17 I watched Les Blank's Burden of Dreams.  Herzog's appetite for risk is inspiring and amazing to see.  Blank's documentary is a bit meandering but it left me wanting to seek out more of Herzog's work.  

4/28/18 I watched Susan Seidelman's Smithereens.  A great post-punk portrait of early 80s NYC that features an extraordinary use of The Feelies' Crazy Rhythms.  It feels more like a Rivette or 80s French film in its looseness and in its "road movie" within one city approach.  Paired on Filmstruck with Jarmusch's Permanent Vacation, this double feature is a great introduction to the American indy film proliferation that would soon follow.    

10/6/18 I watched Edward Yang, Yi Chang, I-Chen Ko and Te-Chen Tao's In Our Time.  It is an anthology film often credited with jumpstarting the birth of the Taiwan New Wave.  The first three films, in particular, impressed me.  They concern themselves with similar areas of life as the Nouvelle Vague before them - youth trying to find its place, the experience of first loves and the awe for and questioning of the world around them.  There is a poetry and a feel for beauty that makes these early films particularly remarkable.  

8/12/20 I watched The Orson Welles Story - Parts 1 and 2.  A great documentary if you want a better look at Welles' personality and perspective on life and his career.  Chronologically told and pretty straightforward stylistically.

9/28/20 I watched Jerzy Skolimowski's Moonlighting.  A strange film that creates a powerful atmosphere and has Jeremy Irons performing yet again at the height of his incredible talent.  It is this odd combination of political allegory told in a Bressonian style.  I found it intriguing although not fully worth the journey.  

6/30/21 I watched William Klein's The French.  A fascinating look at The French Open and tennis in the early eighties.  I have certainly never gotten this kind of look into professional tennis, particularly from inside the locker room.  Klein takes a patient, unobtrusive, Wiseman-like approach, producing a gem of a "sports movie".

8/22/21 I watched Maroun Bagdadi's Little Wars.  It was fairly compelling at times as my first experience with Lebanese cinema.  But overall I found it quite difficult to follow.

12/14/21 I watched Abbas Kiarostami's The Chorus.  Another short that has Kiarostami's child-like simplicity on display.  Not as strong as some of the other short work of his I have seen but worth a viewing for any Kiarostami completist.

12/28/21 I watched Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria.  Interesting to see a big-budget Hollywood movie explore homosexuality in 1982.  The film, like most of Edwards' work, verges on the screwball but goes down easily if you are open to that type of ride.  Thematically there seems to be this recurrent idea at the core of many of his films of someone pretending to be something other than what they are.  

1/24/22 I watched Jacques Demy's Une chambre en ville.  Demy's films seek a heightened emotional effect through accenting the theatrical possibilities of the medium and by maximizing the artifice of the acting, the set design and even certain graphic moments such as the shot of a suicide or of a naked body revealed underneath a fur coat.  I feel some of his other work on a deeper level than this one but I still respect his unique approach and talent.

3/12/22 I watched Wim Wenders' Reverse Angle.  There's a period of Wenders' work from 1974-1985, from Alice in the Cities to Tokyo-Ga, that is among my favorite of any director's films.  Sure, it didn't hurt that Wenders had Robby Muller alongside him for almost the entirety of the run, framing the world in poetic ways arguably as well as any cinematographer in the history of the medium.  

During this time, what always struck me the most, was the intimacy of the work.  Wenders' films felt like personal journals, close mirrors to his mind and experiences at the time.  And, this very short work from 1982 is yet another striking part of that great period of work.    

7/5/22 I watched Wim Wenders' Room 666.  A short Wenders interview film where he contemplates the future of cinema and the threat posed to it by television alongside several of his fellow directors.  Not all that compelling. 

8/18/22 I watched Tony Richardson's The Border.  A film that fits in with its mood and style with the end of the cycle of the American New Wave.  Reminiscent of films like Cutter's Way and Out of the Blue that use naturalistic means to examine a decaying American Dream. 

10/24/22 I watched Wim Wenders' Hammett.  What is Wenders up to in this film?  It is in the middle of one of my favorite runs in all of film history - Alice in the Cities to Paris, Texas.  Whereas most of his other work, like Hammett, speaks to Wenders' love of the history of cinema, this is the only film from that period where Wenders never wants us to forget we are in a movie.  Throughout Hammett, Wenders questions film creators, film creations and film history in a way that I can never remember him doing as boldly before or since.    

6/8/24 I watched Tim Hunter's Tex.  It's amazing how well Hinton and Hunter here offer a continuation of the 50s melodrama, with the fever dream emotions of films like Rebel With A Cause or East of Eden.  

1976: Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders)

1976: Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders)
Why Robby Muller isn't more of a household name is beyond me?  He's responsible for five or six of the most beautiful films ever made:  Dead Man, Alice in the Cities, Paris, Texas, Down by Law, Breaking the Waves, The American Friend, and Kings of the Road.  Okay, make that eight or nine!


I find that Muller has as great a sensitivity and relationship to nature as any cameraman that has ever worked in the medium.  There's a poetry to the way that he frames the outdoors and a lyricism to the way he lets his camera slowly absorb images that is deep and elemental.   And nowhere is his special gift so apparent, so affecting, as in this early Wenders road epic.  


This one demands patience, but if you can get hooked on its rhythms, it's an incredibly moving tale of friendship, love, and cinema.  It's also a definite desert island choice in these parts.  

Other contenders for 1976:  This is yet another strong year, in my opinion, even though there are a number of titles I still need to see.  These include:  Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot, Alan Rudolph's Welcome to L.A., Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O..., Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, Jacques Rivette's Noroit and Duelle, Joseph Losey's Mr. Klein, Francois Truffaut's Small Change, Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent, Ingmar Bergman's Face to Face, Luchino Visconti's L'innocente, Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, Dario Argento's Suspiria, Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos, Don Siegel's The Shootist, and Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon.  I need to revisit Sidney Lumet's Network as it's a film I've struggled with in the past.  From this year though, I really like Roman Polanski's The Tenant, Brian De Palma's Carrie and Obsession, David Lynch's Eraserhead, and John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13.  I love Alan Pakula's All the President's Men.  And my closest runner-up is Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

4/11/11 I watched Francois Truffaut's Small Change.  A strange film. Sweet, and at times Truffaut amazes at how he's able to remember and capture some of the aspects and feelings of childhood.  But it seems as awkward and distracted as most young children, and this meandering quality starts to take away after awhile.  


5/13/11 I watched Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot.  An unusual final film from a master.  It's fun, light in many ways, and still maintains much of the great Hitch touch.  Dern is perfectly cast, as is Barbara Harris and Ed Lauter.  


7/22/11 I watched Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses.  The ultimate film on co-dependency.  Incredibly intense and disturbing. Oshima proves himself one of the ultimate "cruel" filmmakers but also one who is unflinching and unafraid to take his subject into every single, possible realm, no matter the risk or daring involved.  Cold and not totally my thing, but I respect the achievement.


8/11/11 I watched Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent.  Incredibly visual, in the way a Tarkovsky film can be.  And particularly affecting when it comes to depicting torture and death.  Ultimately hard for me though to find a real window into it emotionally.  


8/19/11 I watched Luchino Visconti's L'innocente.  Another psychological and claustrophic chamber piece from Visconti.  Not my thing at all, but well done for what it is.  

3/7/17 I rewatched Michael Ritchie's The Bad News Bears.  Ritchie's slacker sensibility is a perfect match with the material.  I don't think this one gets near enough attention and should be in any conversation around the greatest sports movies of all time.

5/14/17 I watched Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O.  The first period piece I have seen from Rohmer and it is a stunner.  What impresses most is the way that Rohmer uses his incredible talent for distillation to tell a story of transcendence and humanism in the unexpected backdrop of the late 1700s.  Rohmer proves that he learned much from Rossellini and the effects he is able to achieve do not feel terribly far removed from Rossellini's great La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV.

8/14/17 I watched Larry Peerce's Two-Minute Warning.  An interesting cast and a somewhat promising plot are let down by pretty uninspired execution.  

1/12/20 I watched Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky.  May only made four features and I had seen the other three before seeing this for the first time.   In seeing her other work, it was already very clear that May was unusually good with her actors and had this very unique, punchy editing style.  Nothing else May had done creates the sense of dread so palpable here or has this level of realism.  It would rank on my list with any overview of key American New Wave films.  It is unrelenting, powerful and a bit different than anything else I have ever seen.   

4/12/20 I watched Joseph Losey's Mr. Klein.  Only the second or third film I have seen from Losey but what a film it is.  Delon's performance ranks with his very  best and Losey sustains interest and an uncomfortable mood and atmosphere throughout every single shot.  The camera is elegant, as are the locations, the set design and the wardrobe and Losey ends up making a film about the Resistance that might be every bit as powerful as Melville's Army of Shadows.  

4/20/20 I watched Abbas Kiarostami's Rang-ha.  One of the things that's most impressive about Kiarostami is his ability to have retained a childlike wonder with the world.  This film is different than anything else I have seen from him but it's a joy to see for anyone interested in a complete understanding of the Iranian master's career.

8/12/20 I watched Abbas Kiarostami's A Wedding Suit.  The premise is great and Kiarostami's patient, warm approach fully visible.  He lets the events slowly unfold, never really taking the story where you expect it to go.  Devoid of music except in the final frames, Kiarostami is already pushing his cinema to strong points of transcendence.  

1974: Chinatown (Roman Polanski)

1974: Chinatown (Roman Polanski)
I'm not a writer.  I probably will never be a writer.  But if I were, I would want my movies to sound like Robert Towne.  During his run from Bonnie and Clyde to Shampoo, Towne operated in a zone of moviespeak nirvana.  Working somewhere between the literary and spoken word, his dialogue was sharper than the way we speak yet close enough to our rhythms and words as to be utterly recognizable.   


Don't get me wrong, I think Roman Polanski is an extraordinary filmmaker.  But when I'm honest about why I like Chinatown so much, I have to give just as much credit to Towne.  Not only does he manage to create one of the very best of all the noir stories, but somehow he's able to work in a history of Los Angeles at the same time.  


The look of the film actually doesn't blow me away.  The magic for me, aside from Towne's work, is in the casting (the choice of John Huston has to rival the genius of Brando in The Godfather), the locations, Jerry Goldsmith's incredible score, and Nicholson's dead-on performance. And the ending.  Probably my favorite in the history of the medium.


As someone who loves noir and will probably make more of them in his career, this one is a bit of a thorn.  I just feel like no matter what I or anyone else does, you can't really top it.  

Other contenders for 1974:  I still have quite a few titles to see.  These include: Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us, Jean Eustache's Mes Petites Amoureuses, Werner Herzog's The Mystery of Kasper Hauser, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Maurice Pialat's La gueule ouverte, Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac, John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, Monte Hellman's Cockfighter, Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien, Abbas Kiarostami's The Traveller, Alain Resnais' Stavisky..., Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch.  I need to revisit both Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein and Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating as it's been too long since I've seen either of them to know where they'd place on this list.  From this year though, I really like Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Orson Welles' F for Fake, and Karel Reisz's The Gambler.  I love Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation and The Godfather: Part II, as well as Robert Altman's California Split and Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise.  And my closest runner-up is Wim Wenders' Alice in the Cities.  

6/12/11 I watched Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us. At times, the most sexual of all the Altman pics I've seen and certainly one of the most interesting. Feels like a movie that Altman really cares about; it's extremely unconventional stylistically, just like McCabe, and in a strange way it almost feels like a precursor to the free-form style Michael Mann would take on with Collateral, Miami Vice, and especially Public Enemies. An Altman film I would need to re-visit as it feels extraordinarily complex. And if it's such a cliche at this point that Hollywood doesn't make 'em like they once did during that special period in the seventies then this film is as much an example as any.


10/16/11 I watched Maurice Pialat's La gueule ouverte.  Who is Maurice Pialat and what makes him special as a filmmaker?  Some have called him the French Cassavetes.  But I think that tag is a bit misleading.  Pialat, like Bresson, was a painter first before trying his hand at film, and his work is much more visually striking than that of Cassavetes.  Where their paths converge is in their raw approach, lack of music, and predilection for loose, extremely natural performances.  Pialat only made ten features in his career, and this is the sixth that I have seen.  It's the one time he collaborated with the masterful cameraman, Nestor Almendros, and the partnership lends poetry and lyricism to Pialat's heavy, uncompromising cinema.  I think this is one of (if not) the strongest film(s) of Pialat that I have seen.  And I hardly ever throw the word out there, but I think this film is a masterpiece.  

7/3/17 I watched Richard Rush's Freebie and the Bean.  A movie that had never hit my radar until about a week ago even though it stars James Caan and Alan Arkin and was made during my favorite period of American film, the Seventies.  The Stunt Man was the only movie I had seen by Rush, and though it had a huge reputation, it never meant very much to me.  Freebie is a bit of a challenge, a loose, messy installment in the buddy cop movie that cares less for plot and narrative logic and more for feel and character.  It has great feel, for instance, for San Francisco and shows us areas of the city I don't feel I have ever seen before on film.  And it has great feel for character.  The bond between Freebie and Bean is deep and most remarkable is that Rush makes us feel the bond simply by having us hang out with them for a couple of hours.  

7/8/17 I watched Peter Hyams' Busting.  Another installment in the 70's buddy cop movie that is mostly noteworthy in how far it pushes the nudity in certain scenes and as a spin-off on the formula that worked so well for The French Connection.  

7/21/17 I watched Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.  Shire's music swings and Matthau pitted against Robert Shaw is never a terrible thing but it never fully grabbed hold of me in any way.  

10/1/17 I watched John Sturges' McQ.  A decently interesting noir with a good Elmer Bernstein theme.  It feels like a moderately achieved hybrid of Bullitt and The French Connection.  

10/7/17 I watched Jean Eustache's Mes Petites Amoureuses.  I have long been a fan of Eustache's The Mother and the Whore but have had some difficulty tracking down the rest of his work.  And I just took a quick peek at Wikipedia and had no idea this was his only other feature.  I knew he had committed suicide young but never knew he only ever made just two features (and a good number of shorts).   This film is extraordinary, capturing a thing that I never before seen captured on film.  The best way I can describe it is the very early awakening of the male interest in females.  It gets into the awkwardness but more than that it gets into the deep yearning and romantic creation that goes in the head of many young boys.  There are a number of flat out brilliant sequences including Daniel's first imaginings while on a train and his encounter with the young girl Francoise in the neighboring town.  

11/4/17 I watched Abbas Kiarostami's The Traveler.  In its one track pursuit and its tunnel focus on the young main character, it feels like a black and white predecessor to Where is the Friend's Home.  It is quintessential Kiarostami in its lyricism, its softness, its feel for the land and its rhythms.  A couple of scenes, like the photography session in the schoolyard, rank as Kiarostami at his most inventive and most cinematic.  Kiarostami would later become a little more rigorous with his filmmaking, longer takes, less music but already in this, his first film over an hour, he announces himself as a great, new humanistic force in the medium.

5/27/18 I watched Luis Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty.  One of Bunuel's most free-flowing and "liberated" films is pure sexual and unpredictable fun.  There are a number of all-time great moments but for me it was the unconventional dinner party and the final sequence at the zoo.  Bunuel's key themes are still there - anti-establishment, anti-Catholic church, surrrealistic flights of fancy - but the contemporary setting gives them a lightness and impact that I have rarely felt while watching his other work.  

10/20/19 I watched Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.  I still am not all that familiar with Fassbinder's work with this only being the third or fourth of his films that I have seen.  But of what I have seen this one impressed me the most.  It is unusually artful in its framing and exquisitely attuned to the evolving feelings between a new couple.  It is restrained, uncompromising and rigorous in all of the best of ways.

3/31/20 I watched Jacques Tati's Parade.  I will admit - I do not know all that Tati is saying in the last feature of his career.  But there is a magic and an otherness about it (I cannot think of any other movie like it) that give it a power.  The way it is shot, with the performers alone from one angle and the crowd in the background of another, suggests the loneliness of performance and the circus-like world that feeds it.  It feels like a celebration of the entertainer and a moving summation of Tati's unique abilities and perspective.

5/8/21 I watched Gordon Parks Jr's Thomasine & Bushrod.  More interesting than fully involving as an African-American variant of Bonnie and Clyde.  

6/6/21 I watched Mostafa Derkaoui's About Some Meaningless Events.  Interesting in that it might be one of the first Moroccan films I have seen.  It strikes me as this mix between Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer and early Kiarostami but without the esthetic force of either.

11/7/22 I watched Martin Davidson and Stephen Verona's The Lords of Flatbush.  Stallone steals the film with a few remarkable scenes where he lets his guard down and shows that he's got real acting chops.  Overall, a bit meandering and we never feel deeply connected to anyone but fun to see for any Stallone or American New Wave completist.