Next up on Did You Have Any Idea This Was Made And Released? is the confident and excellent 50’s-set drama Indignation, from producer/writer/scholar James Schamus, who made his directorial debut with this adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name. Schamus has, for the last 20 years, been Ang Lee’s main creative collaborator, and…
Released in 1960, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment stands as one of the filmmaker’s greatest works, a motion picture written with intelligence, directed with style, and preformed with vitality by its splendid cast, which included Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, David Lewis, Willard Waterman, David White, Edie Adams, Hope Holiday, and Jack Kruschen….
One of the only CGI-dominated franchises that I personally care about at the moment, the recent rebooting of Planet of the Apes has been spectacular, with both films delivering supreme, photo-real visual effects and narratives that feel topical and human and never anything more than they have to be. This summer’s upcoming War for the…
I’m not sure where we’d be in the film world right now without the erudite efforts of companies A24 and Annapurna Pictures. These two production and distribution entities have been responsible for the lion’s share of truly excellent cinema over the last 10 years, and added to that list is the film 20th Century Women,…
I really enjoy documentaries about movies that never came to be, stuff like The Life and Death of Superman Returns and Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. And similar to those poignantly enjoyable ruminations on films that never came to pass, Jodorowsky’s Dune, from director Frank Pavich, is a…
Peter Weir’s career is a unique one; I can think of few other filmmakers who have made as many great films as he has to then just become forgotten about by the studios. Granted, he’s not likely interested in the CGI-driven idiocy that has come to dominate the mass movie market, but it’s sad to…
The Palestinian film Omar, which was released in 2013, is an incredibly lean and disciplined political thriller that ticks like a fine-tuned clock on a narrative level, and offers up riveting thrills when it comes to its action bits. Director Hany Abu-Assad packs a serious punch into his film, which mixes romance and sociopolitical observations…
The horror genre is my least traveled and I’m certainly no big fan of zombie narratives (my favorite is easily Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead) but WOW and WOW, the South Korean film Train to Busan is completely insane and amazing and unrelenting in its awesomeness. What’s also excellent about the film is that…
James Gray makes films that are now considered “throwbacks” which is part of the reason why he’s yet to have a true break-out box-office hit with general audiences. It also doesn’t help that distribution problems have plagued more than one of his efforts, and let’s be honest, in this lowest common denominator movie marketplace that…
Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho is extremely adept at juggling many different tones all throughout his diverse body of work (Barking Dogs Never Bite, The Host, Mother, Memories of Murder) and his latest, the ambitious sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer is no exception. Visually bold, gloriously alive in every frame, and filled with enough ideas and subtext to match…
Walter Hill, sadly, has made so many films that have bombed with theatrical audiences, and one of his most underappreciated efforts is his 1984 “Rock & Roll Fable” Streets of Fire, which features Michael Pare and a blazing-hot Diane Lane as music-crossed lovers who have to contend with a lethal biker gang led by a…
Loving is a respectful, reverential piece of work from cool-as-a-cucumber budding auteur Jeff Nichols (Midnight Special, Take Shelter, Mud, Shotgun Stories). With a dramatic through line that remains on an even keel and quiet temperament for two hours, this is a somber and sad yet never overly sentimental true life story of Richard and Mildred…
Thoroughly inconsequential and better off because of that, Ben Wheatley’s wickedly entertaining Free Fire is a film of no redeeming social value, and completely awesome fun during all of its extra-tight 85 minute run time. This film is EXACTLY as advertised: 15 minutes of set-up, and 70 minutes of violent, trigger-happy action with loads of…
High-concept yet made with a refreshing lack of cynicism, the 2011 should-have-been-blockbuster Real Steel operates as a slickly designed fighting-robot movie that actually pauses for a real and honest story about a father and son trying to reconnect; this is old-school Amblin territory and producer-director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) really nailed the tone. Written by…
Marijuana and the movies have had a long, mostly potent relationship. Cannabis has inspired any number of cinematic artists, and it’s important to note how public perception of pot has changed throughout the years, with evolving laws and a recent explosion of smoker-friendly content. The social hysteria that greeted the infamous 1930’s exploitation film Reefer…
John McTiernan’s supremely entertaining and exceedingly stylish remake of The Thomas Crown Affair is a film that I saw multiple times in the theater, and absolutely love revisiting multiple times per year. I remember seeing this picture with my then-girlfriend-now-wife back in 1999. and the zest and sizzle that this film emits never ceases to…
