Rating: 10 / 10 There have now been 23 James Bond movies — well, 25 if you count the unsanctioned 1983 Connery vehicle Never Say Never Again or the 1967 Casino Royale spoof with David Niven and Woody Allen — and not a one of them looks as exquisitely beautiful as Skyfall. Academy Award-winning director…
Rating: 9 / 10 Filmed in black-and-white, set almost entirely on a small sailboat, and with a cast of only three characters, there’s something warm and analog about Roman Polanski’s debut film Nóż W Wodzie (Knife In The Water) . Like slipping a needle on a vinyl groove, the film cracks and pops and skips…
Rating: 8 / 10 Slacker, Richard Linklater’s landmark 1991 independent film, is ostensibly a celebration of Austin’s self-proclaimed “slacker” culture, a loose-knit hodge-podge of eccentrics, oddballs, loners, artists, intellectuals, anarchists, pseudo-intellectuals, conspiracy theorists, superfreaks, what-have-you. The film presents no driving narrative, no real plot to speak of, and nary a whisper of a storyline. Linklater’s…
Rating: Are you kidding me? I don’t think you have really lived until you’ve watched the Bee Gees engage in a disco kung-fu battle against poorly choreographed nurses while Steve Martin, gyrating in the corner and performing a rather freakish Peter Lorre impression, dodges blows from a silver cane swung by Peter Frampton. But let’s not get ahead…
Rating: 8 / 10 There is a meticulous degree of staged composition in Nicolas Winding Refn’s utterly compelling Bronson, one which runs almost counter-intuitive to the narrative’s freewheeling nihilistic bent. This story of Britain’s most infamous prisoner, played with ridiculously brutish theatricality in a masterful performance by Tom Hardy, doesn’t really tell us a thing about…
Rating: 10 / 10 You show me a David Cronenberg movie that thematically tackles the transitory nature of the flesh, the inherently stateless class of consciousness, or the symbiotic relationship between man and technology, and I’ll expect any of a dozen movies he’s made over the course of his career. (I still think his masterful…
In memory of Tony Scott, who took his own life at the age of 68 on August 19, 2012, I thought I’d revisit a write-up I did for his seminal 80s music-video turned something wholly other military manlove flick “Top Gun”. Written as a DVD review way back in 2004, I had a blast with…
Rating: 8 / 10 The Raid: Redemption (Serbuan Maut) is a 2011 Indonesian action/martial arts epic extravaganza that seems to be a feature-length version of the last 40 minutes of John Woo’s epic Hard-Boiled. And that’s not necessarily a criticism, either. There’s no doubt that director Gareth Evans set out to produce a gritty, no-quarter-given…
Rating: 6 / 10 It’s almost impossible to not get your mad love on for a Clint Eastwood western in which he plays a squinty, gravely-voiced, nigh-invincible gunslinger, especially when paired against a steel-eyed, cold-blooded villainous Marshal in the dusty streets of 19th-Century California mining town. Throw in some supernatural overtones and Biblical parallels that add…
Movies have been the predominant art form of the past century, and like any form of expression you got some good stuff, a bit of great stuff, and a WHOLE lotta garbage (in strict accordance with Sturgeon’s epic pontification). Still, most people can easily make the distinction between the movies for which they feel deep…