I saw this in the theater before the pandemic, and I thought it was wonderful. Say what you will about Hollywood pairing old men with young women, but it was clear that Audrey was enthralled to be there with Astaire, who, even at nearly 60, is an unparalleled screen dancer. And Kay Thompson, the author of Eloise?… Read more
Paul W S Anderson does one thing: take advantage of the set pieces available like no one else. I rewatched the first RE movie yesterday after a long time and is the guy good at making you always feel oriented.
I can’t believe I’ve missed a movie with this pedigree from one of the more fascinating decades of Mitchum’s career. There have been earlier postwar crime films with Americans in Japan (Humphrey Bogart and Robert Ryan each did one) but the timing of this one seems uniquely compelling. America was steadily losing its… Read more
The film is moody and gorgeous and worth it already for that first sequence, one of the most otherworldly scenes I’ve ever seen in a film. At the same time, I finally found the film so ambiguous and elliptic, it ended up vague and almost kind of arbitrary: it could have been Amador - or not. He’s so internalised, he… Read more
This movie was kickass. I was scared Hyams wouldn’t be able to follow up Day of Reckoning, and he was smart to go the opposite direction and make a minimalist thriller. Even stripped of the arthouse influences, he can make something completely gripping. Read more
I would love to see what the younger Hyams would do with Timecop. He turned Universal Solidier franchise into dark sci fi thrillers defined by paranoia, brutal action and Frankenstein monsters with PTSD. Hyams found the existential horror in soldiers who can’t die, I ‘m sure he’d have an equally interesting, pulpy… Read more
Goddamn, I still love this movie, which is still far and away the best game-to-movie and it isn’t even close. It knows what it wants to do and does it well, coupled with some terrific fight choreography, a script wittier and quotable than it had any right to be, and stunning on-location shoots and set design. And of… Read more
I caught this at a 70mm screening at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and loved every second. It really deserves a big canvas.
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Odd Obsession was beautiful and frustrating in all the ways a good video or record store should be. I started going there in the time of the second location, and continued through the third, which didn’t really have the same magic, but was still a great resource. I moved from Chicago before it moved to a fourth. Read more
I enjoyed my time (aside from the abysmal pay) working at an independent video store around the turn of the century. Dial up internet was still king so you couldn’t search online trying to find some movie. You had to rely on the employees to figure it out for you. Our staff was weirdly divergent in interests, everyone… Read more
When we met, I was 18 and Brian Chankin was at most 25. At the time, he looked like a vampire. I remember he was…
both Sons of Lee Marvin
Bottle Rocket was a Gracie Films production, distributed by Columbia. Depending on how precise they’re being here about funding streams, etc., it seems like it might qualify for inclusion on the list, but probably not. Gracie Films was set up by James Brooks with 20th Century Fox, then later switched to a deal with… Read more
In the opening scene of Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers, a middle-aged Romanian cop arrives in the Canary Islands…
I actually knew Jewell a bit, through some high school friends who worked summer jobs in (this will be shocking) a store security department that he ran years before the events here. He was just a nice, mild-mannered guy and anyone who knew him at all could have told you he was not single-handedly outwitting the FBI.… Read more
The murder of the Italian director and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini on November 2, 1975—just weeks before the…
Claire Denis is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, but don’t let her hear you say that. She’s not crazy about…
