Movies

The Good, the Bad, and the Strange

Did someone sneak a camcorder into Film Forum when they recently had an extremely rare showing of “The Witches” (1966)? Though the film’s episodes include a one-of-kind collaboration between Neorealist Italian director Vittorio de Sica and a very young Clint Eastwood during his Spaghetti Western period (he plays a bespectacled professor, poster notwithstanding), this curiosity has never been released on video in the U.S. But the Eastwood segment of “The Witches” mysteriously just popped up on You Tube, and Screen Grab thoughtfully offers links to both parts for Eastwood and De Sica completists who couldn’t cut work on a Monday. Screen Grab also has an essay on why filmmakers shouldn’t leave movies about religion to the “noxious innocuousness” (try saying that three times fast) of recent faith-based films.