Category: Starring Debuts

Back in the day critics complained Arthur Penn’s directorial masterpiece glamorized crime, desensitized folks to violence, made them more aggressive, was a terrible influence on the young

Thanks to the sensation of 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, sleek dance movies were hot shit during the eighties. 1980’s atypical, bloody dull yet very successful Fame kicked things off before the trend peaked in popularity.

Michael Mann has been making films for more than four decades. He’s no Kubrick, but the similarity of his painstaking approach means it’s pretty straightforward to get up to speed with his concise back catalog.

Bud Stamper (a 23-year-old Beatty) and Deanie (a bewitching Natalie Wood) excel at capturing such sexual repression, desperate to get it on.

Keaton had loads of juicy roles throughout the seventies, including two Godfathers and all that excellent Woody Allen stuff, but the financially successful, bafflingly titled Goodbar was the first to truly put the focus on her. In many ways it’s a bad, overlong movie and I’d argue she’s miscast coz it sure is weird seeing…

Stallone is the only actor to have a number one film at the American box office for six decades in a row. I guess critics need to bear that in mind if they want to try to mock his acting, writing, directing and overall contribution to cinema.

Fox was a lightweight actor, his limitations exposed whenever he took on stuff with any gravity, such as a rape-objecting grunt in Casualties of War or a cokehead loser in Bright Lights, Big City. Man, does he not sit right in those two flicks, but as a bewildered Californian schoolboy frantically trying to save his…

Some people need a good, hard slap to wake them the fuck up and there would be no more deserving recipient than Holly Sargis (Spacek). She’s vapid, easily led and amoral, a freckled, baton-twirling fifteen-year-old girl who barely mutters a word of protest during the murder of her father. “Are you gonna be OK?” she…

Caine left it late to become a major player, wading through almost twenty bit parts and slipping into his thirties before Zulu catapulted him to stardom. In truth, his role as Victoria Cross recipient Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead is not among my faves, partly because he doesn’t get to do a lot. It is a notable…