Make no mistake – this is a bad movie. This is a film about a high school stud who gets murdered, then starts traveling between dimensions, assumes the spirit of a souped up sports car, which then starts extracting bloody and explosive revenge on the people who wronged him by driving them off the road….
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…
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…
