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
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 Hatfields and McCoys were two hillbilly clans on the West Virginia-Kentucky border who spent a couple of generations killing each other over real and perceived infractions as part of a private war whose after-effects have echoed down the ages, having finally subsumed the entire political culture of the United States.
Recommended Sure, its title might bring to mind some sort of brutal, nihilistic Spaghetti Western, but 1975’s Bite the Bullet is instead a character-driven adventure, one that’s set against the backdrop of an epic race at the [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] Read the entire 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 …
Rent It The Movie: When I revisited the 2011 World Series earlier in the year, I really enjoyed how the series’ momentum between the Texas Rangers and St. Louis Cardinals swung back and forth many times through the course of the series, and that Game 6 “was the most tension-filled and perhaps one of the best in recent Series memory.” And to presumably further the case of this, A&E (in …
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