Tag Archives: Michael Caine

From The Vault: Play Dirty (1969)

August 27, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by André De Toth | Written by De Toth, Melvyn Bragg, Lotte Colin, and George Marton | 118 min | ▲▲▲ | On DVD Before the Shane Black movie with the same title arrives on Prime, let me share a few words about a lost Michael Caine picture from the late 1960s. I've been… Read More

From The Vault: The Whistle Blower (1986) review

June 29, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by Simon Langton | Written by Julian Bond, from the novel by John Hale | 100 min | ▲▲1/2 | on Amazon Prime I was a bit disappointed by The Holcroft Covenant, which I watched a few weeks back, but it reminded me Michael Caine enjoys espionage thrillers, as do I. Maybe the best… Read More

From The Vault: The Holcroft Covenant (1985) review

April 21, 2025 flawintheiris

Directed by John Frankenheimer | Written by George Axelrod, Edward Anhalt, and John Hopkins, based on the Robert Ludlum novel | 112 min | ▲▲ | Prime I've seen a lot of the movies Michael Caine made in the 1980s where, famously, he said yes to everything. Jaws 4: The Revenge, for example, in 1987.… Read More

Documentary Reviews: Sidney, The Sound of 007, Nothing Compares

October 10, 2022 flawintheiris

Sidney | Directed by Reginald Hudlin | Written by Jesse James Miller | 111 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Apple TV+ Earlier this year on the podcast I co-host with Stephen Cooke, LENS ME YOUR EARS, we took a look back at some of Sidney Poitier's great films. To be honest, we only scratched the surface.… Read More

A Decade of FITI reviews: Interstellar

February 16, 2022 flawintheiris

Having written thousands of reviews over the (actually more than) 10 years of this blog, I figured it might be fun to go into the vault and bring dusty, perhaps forgotten reviews back into the light. Expect these to show up around once a week for the next little while. I may lightly edit these… Read More

Best Sellers review — Talented cast lost in predictable dramedy

September 17, 2021 flawintheiris

Directed by Lina Roessler | Written by Anthony Grieco | 100 min | On Demand Here's how the IMDB describes this film: "A cranky, retired author reluctantly embarks on a final book tour to help out a young publisher." This isn't entirely accurate. First off, the author isn't retired, he's Harris Shaw (Michael Caine), an… Read More

Sean Connery: 10 Of His Best Non-Bond Roles

November 4, 2020 flawintheiris

Sean Connery died on Saturday, October 31, at age 90. The Scottish actor was the first cinematic James Bond, and for many will always be the greatest — defining the mix of suave, stylish, sexy, and ruthless for a generation of fans. While so much of what he did with that character is easy to… Read More

Tenet review — Nolan’s time-travel spy thriller almost too complex

August 27, 2020 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan | 150 min | Netflix Christopher Nolan's enormous, brilliant movies are never less than ambitious, and the best of them find a balance between the kinetic, the cerebral, and the passionate — I'm thinking of Memento, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk, even his Dark Knight trilogy. His newest blockbuster nails… Read More

King of Thieves review — Real-life seniors heist should be more fun

April 1, 2020 flawintheiris

Directed by James Marsh | Written by Joe Penhall, based on an article by Mark Seal | 108 min | Amazon Prime Pretty quick turnaround on this true-life heist story: It was Easter 2015 when a group of bank robbers broke into a London safe deposit company through an elevator shaft. They drilled through the… Read More

A Brief History of Spy Movies: Part Two

June 29, 2019 flawintheiris

40 YEARS OF SPY THRILLERS In the first post I watched the Harry Palmer movies, and the third I look at the film adaptations of John Le Carré novels. Here's a cross-section of stellar—and not-so stellar—spy movies through the years. The Quiller Memorandum (1966) was directed by Michael Anderson, Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay based on… Read More