Based on Thomas Pynchon’s much celebrated novel, this is a wild, ridiculous, totally blazed piece of work that had “cult-classic” status written all over it the moment it was released in theaters a few years ago. Different and yet similar to obvious inspirations such as The Big Lebowski, The Big Sleep, and The Long Goodbye,…
Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs is one of my favorite comedies of all time. Of course, comedy is easily the most subjective genre out there, but for me, this film just nails its target so often that it’s impossible not to smile at all of the loving fun it pokes at Star Wars and countless other space…
Infused with a tragic sense of personal melancholy as his wife was murdered in real life, writer/director Brad Silberling’s unfairly neglected 2002 drama Moonlight Mile is a heartfelt and consistently moving piece of cinema that features sterling work from Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon as grieving parents, baby-faced Jake Gyllenhaal as their emotionally stunted would-be…
Last year’s thoroughly entertaining and always absorbing true-life boxing movie Bleed for This, from writer/director Ben Younger (Boiler Room, Prime), deserved a lot more than to bomb at the box-office and draw only middling critical responses. What were people expecting? This movie hits all the proper beats, digs in deep to the hardscrabble world that…
Robert Redford’s brilliant family drama Ordinary People is a great movie. How could it not be? It’s real. It’s genuine. Nothing is overdone. And everything works. Redford’s invisible direction, for which he won an Oscar in no less than his directorial debut, is sublime, never showboating in any aesthetic fashion, instead allowing Alvin Sargent’s sensitive…
The Nickel Ride is a cool as a cucumber crime film from 1974, patiently directed by Robert Mulligan (Summer of ’42, The Stalking Moon, To Kill A Mockingbird) from a sly, morally ambiguous screenplay by then-newbie Eric Roth (Munich, Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Insider). The plot centers on a “key-man”…
Escape from Tomorrow is a work of cinematic madness. This willfully deranged little freak-out was written and directed by Randy Moore, and because this was his debut feature, the film feels even more radical than if a more seasoned filmmaker had attempted something similar. The narrative pivots on a recently unemployed father (Roy Abramsohn, totally…
Jim Jarmusch’s low-key and elegant film Paterson is another feather in the cap for this idiosyncratic auteur, starring an intensely committed Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver named Paterson, who happens to live in the city of Paterson. The film is part fantasy, part meditation, and all wonderful, with an observant eye for…
I was 11 years old when my father took me to see James Cameron’s masterpiece Terminator 2: Judgment Day on the big screen over the Fourth of July weekend. This was not just “seeing a movie,” but rather, this particular cinematic experience was a true mind-blower, and over the years, I’ve returned to this seminal…
Bitter, subversive, and violently fierce all throughout its super-lean 80 minute running time, Doug Liman’s Iraq war thriller The Wall operates as both a minimalist genre exercise ala Phone Booth and Buried, while angrily commenting on American foreign military involvement. And it serves as a reminder that Liman, who certainly got bit by the blockbuster…
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….
Director Oden Roberts (Cannes Golden Lion winner 2012), draws on his own experiences of being recruited by the Army in High School, allowing us a look behind the curtain of the controversial recruiting practices of the US Army post 9/11. Driven by powerhouse performances from Lew Temple and Clayne Crawford, A Fighting Season really shines…
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…
A former youth boxing champion, Jimmy McCabe (Johnny Harris), is a man desperately in search of hope, but looking in all the wrong places. When he hits rock bottom he turns to his childhood boxing club and the only family he has left: gym owner Bill (Ray Winstone) cornerman Eddie (Michael Smiley)…
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,…
