You’ll know within the first few minutes of the impossible to completely describe and classify film Hard To Be A God if you’re going to make it through all three hours of this carnival of cinematic madness. In production for 13 years with director Aleksei German passing away before the film could be fully completed…
The insane German import Wetlands is singular, gross, nauseating, highly sexual, strange, lovely, smart, insane, icky, depraved, uber-graphic, and sort of monumental. It’s never, ever going to be remade for American audiences and it’s likely to appeal strictly to fans of “cinema-as-art.” I’ve never seen anything remotely like it. You get to see a POV…
Paul Schrader’s script included some shout-outs to his decades earlier work in Taxi Driver, but this was its own thing, based on Joe Connelly’s bleak novel, and looking at a particular lifetstyle we don’t see too often on screen. Nicolas Cage was electrifying here — it’s a truly bravura big-screen performance, filled with the customary…
I’m always wholly fascinated by this film, and it’s something I feel that’s worth revisiting every year because of how it uses aesthetics to drive the plot. Boarding Gate is genre-hopper Olivier Assayas (Carlos, Summer Hours, Irma Vep) doing a sort-of Michael Mann-esque anti-thriller that’s more cerebral than crammed with action. It’s the kind of…
I find myself frequently coming back to this title over the last few months. Emperor of the North, aka Emperor of the North Pole, is an exceedingly masculine film. You can smell the cinematic machismo dripping off of Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine all throughout this beefy action-adventure from man’s man director Robert Aldrich (The…
Side Effects is a slick, smart, and deceptively layered thriller from Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns, who before this under the radar gem crafted the irreverent comedic masterwork The Informant! Side Effects is an extremely stylish head game that loves toying with the audience at all times, and it also happens to be…
Collateral is a laser-precise action thriller, that as per usual for macho auteur Michael Mann, also stops to pause for the introspective moment from time to time, certainly more than your average studio shoot ‘em up. This was a theatrical five-timer for me, and it’s a movie I’ve revisited numerous times on DVD and Blu-ray;…
In 2008, eclectic filmmaker Gus Van Sant released two films: Paranoid Park, a challenging and formally adventurous indie, and the more classically structured but no less emotionally stirring biopic Milk. I’ve long been fascinated by Van Sant’s interesting and unpredictable career, and his film about San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, who was the first openly…
Credit must be given to director Reed Morano with her feature film debut Meadowland – she’s taken incredibly dark and troubling material and turned it into an inherently compelling, extremely raw, and often times painful cinematic experience, one that’s wholly engrossing, but that will test the strength of most viewers. Given that the film is…
Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies is a good story that’s well told, thoroughly absorbing, and spectacular in terms of production values. Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance are wonderful, with the latter putting on a subtle acting clinic for the ages, and the former reminding us how consistently excellent he is as our American everyman. The…
Danny Boyle’s riveting and unconventional biopic Steve Jobs is a complete knock-out from start to finish, and as bracingly un-Hollywood as this sort of material is going to get. This is laser-precise filmmaking, acted with extreme gusto, written with absurd skill, and shot and cut in a manner that suggests erudite style without ever feeling…
Bronson was the film that brought director Nicolas Winding Refn and actor Tom Hardy into my cinematic sights, and since then, I’ve followed both artists with intense fervor and anticipation. This film is like nothing else I’ve ever seen, and even if it blends elements from other films within its framework, the overall originality of…
Fury is a reminder of how hellish life must’ve been like for guys suffering through tank warfare during WWII. This is another film that’s been making the HD movie channel rounds of late, and I always stop on it for a few beats, because it thoroughly kicks ass at almost every opportunity. Embracing the gung-ho…
Morally probing, moodily stylish, and intensely acted by all, French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s thoroughly gripping and realistically violent kidnapping/revenge thriller Prisoners is one of the finest American crime movies in years, a film that has both a commercially satisfying mystery and thoughtful meditations on evil and the necessity/desire for retribution at its bleak and…
