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…
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….
I don’t get too hung up on poetic license and the reshaping of history when it comes to glossy and well-meaning Hollywood biographical tales, so in that regard, I enjoyed last year’s Oscar nominated drama Hidden Figures from director Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent). This is the compelling story of three African-American women who led the…
Luc Besson’s wild and wacky sci-fi action film The Fifth Element is one of the most insane pieces of eye-candy ever devised, with a cartwheeling sense of manic energy, absolutely stunning production values, an overstuffed screenplay, and performances that range all over the map in terms of tone. I can vividly remember seeing this film…
Many people seem to love to hate David Fincher’s divisive, Oscar-baiting epic The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but I’m definitely not in that group. This is a ravishing movie, filled with more emotion and heart than any previous Fincher film and any Fincher film to come after. Yes, the heart that beats all throughout…
I expect more from David Fincher than remakes of airport novels, but even when he’s “slumming,” the end-result can be fascinating and visually striking. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had of course become a smash-hit in both book and film form in its home country of Sweden, but that meant nothing to the Hollywood…
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…
Obviously not the greatest movie ever made by legendary filmmaker John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Ronin), I still can’t help but be fascinated by the comic-book-inspired insanity of his odd-ball curiosity 99 and 44/100% Dead. Released in 1974 and starring Richard Harris as a love-struck hit-man caught in the middle of an escalating gang war,…
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…
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)…
Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho is extremely adept at juggling many different tones all throughout his diverse body of work (Barking Dogs Never Bite, The Host, Mother, Memories of Murder) and his latest, the ambitious sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer is no exception. Visually bold, gloriously alive in every frame, and filled with enough ideas and subtext to match…
Walter Hill, sadly, has made so many films that have bombed with theatrical audiences, and one of his most underappreciated efforts is his 1984 “Rock & Roll Fable” Streets of Fire, which features Michael Pare and a blazing-hot Diane Lane as music-crossed lovers who have to contend with a lethal biker gang led by a…
When elite cyber-hacker Cipher (Charlize Theron) blackmails Dominic Toretto (Diesel) into turning against his crew, it’s up to the gang to understand what is happening to their friend and save the world from the cyber terrorists rampage with help from an unlikely ally. The movie starts out in Cuba where Dom and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez)…
Mel Gibson’s unsurprisingly savage WWII film Hacksaw Ridge delivers the fiery-action goods. I was definitely impressed by the wild stunt work and some of the individual bits of action, and it’s truly lunatic/nuts of conscientious objector Desmond Doss to have done what he did in real life. The religious angle, thankfully, isn’t hit too hard…
Sightseers is most likely my favorite film from Ben Wheatley so far, and that says a lot, as I’ve enjoyed all of his work. For some reason, I just can’t stop revisiting this movie; there’s something uniquely deranged about it that speaks to me and my love for satirical black comedy. However, you should only…
