Frank Perry

A Hollywood actress undergoes a psychic breakdown and recalls the traumatic events which led to her stay at a sanitarium.Read More »

One of the few bona fide counter-cultural films to be produced by a major studio, The Swimmer is a sun-scorched and surreal suburban satire that boasts a fine performance from Burt Lancaster (Castle Keep, Buffalo Bill and the Indians) as Ned Merrill, the all-American man who one day determines to swim home to his Connecticut mansion via a series of pools in his neighbourhood.

Directed by Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife) imbues Eleanor Perry’s (David and Lisa, Ladybug Ladybug) adaptation of John Cheever’s short story with stunning expressionistic flourishes, creating a true masterpiece of cinema.Read More »

Frank and Eleanor Perry’s heartbreaking feature adaptation of three Truman Capote stories, produced in collaboration with Capote himself. The stories all center around the relationship between two slightly odd, outcast characters, and they all hover around the idea of loss — but each winds up in a starkly different place, perhaps even in a different genre. Magnificently written, acted, and directed – an absolute shame that it’s not better known.Read More »

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During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the normal routines of a rural elementary school are thrown into a panic when the civil defense alarm sirens go off, warning them of an imminent nuclear attack. The children are separated into groups, with one teacher leading each squad. Mrs. Andrews, the 6th grade teacher with a slowly building sense of doom, leads her group of students through the countryside to one of the children’s family’s bomb shelter. When they arrive at the shelter, they divide the rations and assume various duties, not knowing if they are in the middle of a nuclear holocaust—or if it was a false alarm.Read More »

The abusive and traumatic adoptive upbringing of Christina Crawford at the hands of her mother, screen queen Joan Crawford, is depicted.Read More »

From nytimes.com

Brash, handsome, ruthless, reckless, ambitious, brilliant and corrupt: these are the thrillingly paper thin qualities undoubtedly possessed by Father John Flaherty in the novel upon which ”Monsignor” is based. As played by a more or less real person (Christopher Reeve), Father Flaherty cannot help but lose some of his two-dimensional luster.Read More »

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Tina Balser is a bored New York housewife-mother married to Jonathan, a pompous, social-climbing lawyer who ridicules her in front of their children, criticizing everything she does or wears. She begins an affair with George Prager, a dashing, successful and blatantly sadistic writer. Finally after George has tormented Tina in much the same manner Jonathan has, and has been unfaithful to boot, she goes back to her husband and begins group therapy.Read More »

New Beverly Cinema writes:
Director Frank Perry deconstructs the legends of Doc Holliday (Stacey Keach) and Wyatt Earp (Harris Yulin) with a vengeance in this superb revisionist take on what went down in Tombstone at the OK Corral. Alcoholic former dentist and gunslinging gambler Holliday settles in Arizona to help treat his tuberculosis, wins one of the Clanton gang’s wives, Kate (Faye Dunaway) in a game of poker and runs into old friend, Wyatt (Harris Yulin). Keach hits just the right tone with his portrayal of the dissolute idealist who is alternately at odds with those closest to him but also a loyal friend. Yulin’s Earp is a conflicted, ambitious man, believing in the rule of law, but also a calculating politician campaigning for sheriff, ready to go up against the most powerful interests in town – which just happen to be the Clantons.Read More »