Well, we can cross one movie off our list of hoped-for DVDs! The Criterion Collection has had the good sense and taste to release director Anthony Mann’s magnificent western THE FURIES (1950). Whether you are a collector or a Netflix user, it’s one you should not miss. In my book SCREEN SAVERS, I focus on [...]

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When Three Kings, a movie about the 1991 Gulf War, was released in 1999 no one knew that there would be a subsequent war with Iraq, beginning in 2003. Yet the film is certainly prescient about what was to come. In defending America’s decision to leave the region, one character asks another if he’d like, [...]

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The Train tells a humane, disturbing story, yet it leaves the viewer to decide what to make of what transpires. Can inanimate objects, however irreplaceable and valuable and beautiful, bear the cost of human life? How do you ask people to sacrifice their lives for pretty pictures? The French characters in The Train aren’t interested [...]

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“What is courage? What is cowardice?” These lines appear onscreen before They Came to Cordura begins. The nature of bravery is an essential component of any war film but rarely has it been examined as directly, or as penetratingly, as it is here. Directed by Robert Rossen, Columbia’s They Came to Cordura was disliked by [...]

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Put aside images from Gone With the Wind (1939) for the moment because one of the most powerful, unsettling, and resonating films made about the war between the states is set a world apart from Miss Scarlett, magnolia blossoms, and mint juleps. The Raid is a Civil War movie that takes place in upstate New [...]

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