Recommended I didn’t realize it until I was watching the movie, but Next of Kin is actually a style of action movie they don’t seem to make anymore: one that focuses on building up the moral or ethical code of its hero rather than the scheme of the villain. The conflict that Patrick Swayze’s Truman Gates faces is not a ticking time bomb or a mad terrorist, but the way his situation places …
Highly Recommended Despite its distinction of being Jean Renoir’s first American film — not to mention one of Fox’s biggest moneymakers from the class of 1941 — Swamp Water has somehow managed to long languish in obscurity. Dismissed by [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] Read the entire review
Rent It The Film: Underutilized actor Nick Stahl, best known from his roles as an earthy super-powered prophet in HBO’s Carnivale , continues his streak of flimsy direct-to-video appearances with On the Inside , an institutional drama-thriller from Haunting in Connecticut director D.W.
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are provided by Music Box Films and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review.
Recommended THE FILM: Say what you will about Mel Gibson’s personality, but the man can make a solid movie, both in front of and behind the camera. Get the Gringo , released by Gibson’s own Icon Productions, may have been poisoned by Gibson’s latest foray into sexism and bigotry, as it failed to receive a wide theatrical release in the United States. That’s too bad, because Get the Gringo is …
Highly Recommended I’d seen the medical thriller Coma (1978) once before, not during its original theatrical run but soon thereafter, and didn’t think very much of it at the time. Probably I was expecting something closer to medical science fiction (which, technically, this also is), that rare sub-genre in which Coma ‘s director, Michael Crichton, got his start as the author of the bestseller …
Recommended Oops. Every nuclear power from one end of the globe to the other had finally agreed to disarm, and they even cooked up an oversized oven to dispose of all those pesky warheads once and for all
Highly Recommended The Movie: Long before Martin Scorsese would become for lack of a better phrase, Martin Scorsese was hungrily trying to get his personal film Mean Streets some big studio support and distribution, particularly in light of friend Francis Ford Coppola’s success with The Godfather . However Scorsese felt that his was a film closer and truer to his experiences growing up. But not …
DVD Talk Collector Series THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are stills provided by Cinema Guild and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. “Even the embers went out.” Anything resembling conventional narrative is dispensed with quickly and tersely, at the very beginning of Hungarian film maestro B la Tarr’s superlative The Turin Horse
Highly Recommended Made during a particularly bleak period for Hammer Films, Twins of Evil (1972) is a pleasant surprise. While still exhibiting the same desperate components of the company’s other horror films of the period – gratuitous nudity, an obviously low budget, and feeble attempts to create a new franchise/horror star – its screenplay is much more intriguing than most early-’70s Hammers …