Tonight’s major motion picture is Ron Shelton’s Tin Cup, which is one of my absolute favorite romantic films ever made. But it’s more than a great romance – it’s a great sports movie, it’s a terrific buddy film, and most importantly, it’s a wonderful piece about human beings and all their persistent foibles and inconsistencies,…
When the credits rolled it all made perfect sense. The film had six screenwriters. Six. Spider-Man: Homecoming is two films. The first story is an incredibly engaging story of class warfare; an examination of how the assembly of the Avengers created an even greater economic divide between the ruling class and the common people….
Tonight’s feature presentation is Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men, which easily makes my personal top five from Scott, and now that it’s a Netflix streaming option, I hope more people check it out. The cinematic sleight of hand on display in this film is remarkable. It’s so stylish in a very subtle way; I love it…
Thank the movie gods that Bong Joon-ho is getting a chance to make movies, and that Netflix had the scratch to finance a $60 million art film that would never have been made at this level anywhere else. I don’t care how many theaters Netflix Originals have access to; that’s not my business, I don’t…
There’s no use denying it. We have no actor who could ever approximate late 70’s Clint Eastwood, no actress quite like Sandra Locke during that time period (she’s SUPER hot in this movie…), the action is forceful and brutal and nearly unrelenting once the narrative kicks into overdrive, while the undercurrent of rape that…
Face/Off unquestionably represents the one and only time that Hollywood really got out of the way of action maestro John Woo and allowed him to go for broke with a big-budget and play on an R-rated playground of his patented poetic ultra-violence. I saw this film twice during opening weekend back in the summer of…
It’s the Fourth of July. It’s hot outside. Go see a movie. Go see Edgar Wright’s exuberant and rip-roaring Baby Driver. It’s tons of fun, it opened strongly over its debut weekend, and it needs great word of mouth, so that studios take more chances with films outside of the various franchises and sequel-ready items…
Black Hawk Down, which was released in 2001 in the shadow of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A tragic anti-war film that manages to celebrate the warrior spirit that only a select few possess while eschewing stodgy and needless politicizing, this film dared to look at a deeply compromised and misguided American military excursion with necessary…
The Onion Field is an upsetting, highly detailed, true-crime movie directed with class by Harold Becker (City Hall, Sea of Love) in his second big-screen effort after The Ragman’s Daughter. Released in 1979 and starring an impressive cast of up and coming talent including an incredible John Savage, a tragic Ted Danson, and a live-wire…
There’s certainly lots of stylish, R-rated action to be found in John Wick 2, but I couldn’t help but feel that not enough of anything particularly new was brought to the table, and I objected to the needless world-building and franchise-leaning aspects of the script by original creator Derek Kolstad. The first film’s co-director Chad…
Easily one of Ridley Scott’s most ambitious movies, 1492: Conquest of Paradise is not without its flaws, but also, not without its merits, most of which stem from the enormity of the physical production; had the script been more historically accurate then we might have had one of the greatest epic adventures of all time….
Tonight’s feature presentation is To Live and Die in L.A., which is most likely the best Michael Mann film that Mann didn’t actually direct. Yes, the film certainly shows some trademarks of its legendary director, William Friedkin (Sorcerer, The French Connection), but there’s a general ambiance and sense of style that feels cut from Mann’s…
After Hours was the first movie where Scorsese worked with legendary cinematographer Michael Ballhaus – sparks would immediately fly and a cinematic love affair would be born. Griffin Dunne was perfectly cast as a Kafka-esque lead character suffering a bizarre night of big city antics that begins to feel like some sort of nightmarish fever…
23 years ago, Tony Scott cheated on Jerry Bruckheimer with Joel Silver and the results were the over-the-top and totally flamboyant The Last Boy Scout, a mean and nasty action flick from the acid-tinged typewriter of genre-master Shane Black. Pairing Bruce Willis with Damon Wayans, on paper, probably seemed like a great idea (to someone…
The King of Comedy is my #3 Martin Scorsese picture behind Goodfellas and Raging Bull. This is a brilliant black comedy, with an aggressively funny and hugely obnoxious performance from Robert De Niro. Jerry Lewis is utterly brilliant here, all dead pan and stern seriousness, completely unimpressed with De Niro’s idiotic pestering and absurd shenanigans….
Brian De Palma’s sleazy, sexy, and visually intoxicating 1984 film Body Double is many things at once: A critique of Hollywood, a retort to film critics, an homage to Hitchcock, a lurid thriller with sex and violence ramped up to a nearly comical degree, and a self-reflexive essay on the auteur behind the camera….
