Walter Hill is one of the manliest directors of my lifetime, or any lifetime. He’s made a career out of telling tales of gunslingers, cops, criminals, and loners, and I instinctively respond to his particular brand of tough guy cinema. Southern Comfort is one of my favorite efforts from Hill, a totally nasty and rather…
Training Day continues to be one of my favorite modern cop films. It smartly balanced entertainment value, social commentary, and genre expectations, with David Ayer’s superb script feeding into director Antoine Fuqua’s muscular visual style, aided by polished yet gritty camerawork from Mauro Fiore, and razor sharp editing courtesy of Conrad Buff. Denzel Washington delivered…
Note: The cut I watched was a pre premiere work in progress cut “press preview” The Girls Were Doing Nothing is a study of our difficulty to accept the conflicting nature of love and the human soul – our basic needs for stability, comfort and routine which clash with equality strong desires for novelty, variety…
A Bigger Splash is one of those films where the primary interest is in exploring mood, atmosphere, and style before anything else. This is a movie about textures, surfaces, and bodies, and how people give off vibes (positive or negative) just by occupying the same space as others, without having to say much at all….
Mat Whitrecross explores one of the biggest British bands of all time, Oasis. The ins and outs, the fights, the egos and a surprisingly shallow look into this music-defining band. From rehearsal footage to interviews with the band, Supersonic goes into detail about how the band was formed, some antics on the road and playing…
This is a disgustingly brutal and rather amazing film that never backs down or pulls any punches, going to some truly extreme places on a narrative and thematic level, resulting in an overall stunning piece of aesthetically ruthless exploitation cinema. I can still remember the first time I saw The Devil’s Rejects, and how utterly…
Brain appétit! The first season of iZombie arrives on DVD October 17. The new hit series stars Rose McIver (Once Upon a Time, Masters of Sex), Malcolm Goodwin (Breakout Kings), Rahul Kohli (Eastenders), Robert Buckley (One Tree Hill) and David Anders (Once Upon a Time, The Vampire Diaries). The 3-disc DVD set includes all…
I’m a huge fan of Adrian Lyne’s sexy, stylish, and provocative work in general, and Unfaithful is easily one of his best films, filled with probing psychological underpinnings and juicy star turns from Richard Gere and Diane Lane, who likely delivered career topping work with her simmering and extremely erotic performance as a suburban housewife…
Unbreakable is easily my favorite film from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, who has had, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating, frustrating, and fantastic careers that any filmmaker has ever had. After taking the world by storm in the late summer of 1999 with his superb ghost movie, The Sixth Sense, he unleashed his…
Bulworth remains just as funny and incisive now as it did back in 1998 when it scorched movie screens. Directed with verve by Warren Beatty and co-written with obscene ferocity by Beatty and Jeremy Pikser, the film stings with blunt truth, outlandish yet cogent satire, and an eerily prescient vibe that feels more and more…
John Lithgow and Alfred Molina deliver wonderful, sensitively attuned performances in Ira Sachs’ warmhearted drama Love is Strange. Portraying an older gay couple living in a gorgeous NYC apartment when they’re suddenly and unexpectedly forced to move out, the film takes a simple and observant look at the lives of these two dapper, eccentric, and…
Few movies have frightened me more in the theater than Fire in the Sky. I was 13 years old when my dad took me to see this incredible alien abduction film, and we went opening night because I was so excited that an alien movie was coming out on the big screen. My fascination with…
The Accountant is exactly the sort of movie that has been in short supply of late — an old school, high concept, totally slick star vehicle with a ridiculous yet extremely entertaining plot that’s just as fun as it is far-fetched. The spec script market seems to be dead, with nearly every film based on…
The Siege of Jadotville, a new Netflix original film, is one of those square-jawed military actioners that used to get released in the 60’s and 70’s, unpretentious and ass-kicking, centering on a true story, and adding appropriate dashes of Hollywood flash while never sacrificing any of the gritty integrity that the material promises. Impressively directed…
John Carney’s Sing Street is a wonderful movie for 98% of its run-time. The performances are confident, the romance is genuinely sweet, the music is catchy, and as usual, Carney’s ability to weave a music-themed plot in with distinctive character work yields some absolutely fantastic scenes. And then, inexplicably, during the last few minutes, the…
To say that I’m a fan of the visceral filmmaking aesthetic of director Paul Greengrass would be a massive understatement. I think he’s a genius, and he’s one of my absolute favorite directors. From the stunningly realized recreations of real-world tragedies as depicted in masterpieces like Bloody Sunday and United 93 to his fantastic studio-based…
