Quick, name the first two actors that come to mind when I say the phrase “badass buddy cops.”

Who’d you think of?

Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal? Hey, me too! …more

We meet Night and the City‘s protagonist Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) in his natural state: on the run from his creditors.

Things are bad for Harry before the movie begins and they will only get worse. He spends most of the movie on the run, robbing Peter to pay Paul. In scenes where no one is currently on his tail, he paces or fidgets or smooths his hair. During Night and the City‘s sad final scene, Widmark collapses exhausted in a heap in a boathouse. “I’m so tired of running,” he sighs. We know how he feels. …more

Brute Force is a robust, testosterone-soaked action picture.

It’s about as manly as movies get, and yet it paints such a different picture of masculinity than the one seen in the robust, testosterone-soaked action pictures of my youth. Those were movies like Commando or Bloodsport, where men were measured primarily by how they filled out a birthday suit while kicking people in the neck. Heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme were such bad actors, it almost seemed like that was the point; that to even attempt realistic human emotion was not appropriate male behavior. …more

When Clint Eastwood made Play Misty for Me he was a cowboy. He got his start on television with Rawhide and of course became an international star in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.

In the six years between the final Leone movie and Misty, Eastwood played four more cowboys (Hang ‘Em High, Paint Your Wagon, Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Beguiled), a couple soldiers from World War II (Where Eagles Dare, Coogan’s Bluff) and a cop out of the west who wore a cowboy hat (Coogan’s Bluff). Interesting, then, that when he got his first opportunity to direct one of his own pictures, he made something so different and so contemporary as Misty.

The picture is a romantic horror film. …more

“Rock and roll’s never ever stood dissecting and inspecting it at close range. It doesn’t stand up. So shut up.”

Jeff Stein’s documentary, The Kids are Alright, lives up to that statement from The Who frontman Roger Daltrey, who shares it near the climax of the film in a chapter the DVD calls “Final Words.”

There isn’t much interview footage in Kids, and what there is is mostly rather silly – the band standing on their hands, or taking the piss out of each other, or joking about their “medicine” with Ringo Starr. The rest of the movie is a collection of the band’s live performances. The combination of tracks is nonchronological, which fits The Who’s style: wild, haphazard, reckless and, above all, exciting because you’re never sure quite what will come next. …more

Footsteps in the Dark is just so wonderfully absurd; there’s maybe eight minutes in this movie that could exist in the real world: they rest is pure poppycock.

It concerns a wealthy married banker (played by Errol Flynn) who moonlights as popular mystery novelist, F.X. Pettijohn, whose latest novel, “Footsteps in the Dark,” is a runaway bestseller …more

Surrogates feels like the least interesting film you could possibly make out of some very interesting material. It presents a world, adapted from the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, full of bold ideas and rich thematic possibilities, then ignores that world completely for an hour and a half to tell an off-the-shelf hard-boiled mystery story.

This is one of those movies that makes you angry, not because of anything it does, but for all the things it doesn’t do and could have if only it had taken some risks. If you’re going to go to a casino, you might as well place some bets. …more

Though its final act revolves around a thoroughly aggravating plot contrivance (“Just tell him Deborah Kerr! TELL HIM!”) and there’s two dopey musical numbers by children’s choirs for no reasons whatsoever, An Affair to Remember is, without question, one of the most romantic movies I’ve ever seen. If that last scene doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, it’s time to get the ducts checked by your optometrist. …more

When people claim Casino Royale is a “realistic” Bond movie, they don’t mean it’s realistic in any sense that relates to the real world, because it’s not and it doesn’t.

They mean it’s more realistic than 1983′s Octopussy, which makes Casino Royale look like it was directed by D.A. Pennebaker. All Bond movies are, to varying degrees male fantasies. Octopussy is, by far, the most fantastic. …more

What a pleasure to find an old Hollywood movie whose primary conflict is the battle of its two leads to get laid.

I don’t mean it in the lovey-dovey romantic ideal sort of way, I mean I Was A War Bride is about the impossible logistics of two people knocking boots in the middle of an armed conflict. In 1949 this was certainly a cheeky topic. Nowadays, it’s downright scandalous. …more

I’m not a big fan of the moment early in the film where Barry Newman’s Kowalski drives past himself in a different car and disappears into thin air (“Holy crap! He just vanished! THAT MUST BE THE VANISHING POINT!”) and in 2010 it’s hard to consider Cleavon Little’s telepathic disc jockey as anything other than a magical negro character. But otherwise, Vanishing Point is damn near perfect, an ideal blend of badass car chases and existential angst. …more

Oh man, do I loves me some bad dubbing. You know what I’m talking about; when a basic cable channel shows an R rated movie on their station but has to edit all of the profanity out to make the film TV-appropriate.

For a fine example, see this excellent YouTube clip, which compares original snippets from Brian De Palma’s Scarface with the hilarious, borderline avant-garde TV versions of the same scenes: …more

Just how intense is The Wages of Fear?

This movie didn’t just make my palms sweat; it made the soles of my feet sweat too. Either I’ve got a glandular problem or this is one suspenseful movie. …more

The Color of Money features two kinds of trick shots: the ones on the pool table and the ones in the camera. “Fast” Eddie Felson puts on a clinic on shot selection on camera and Scorsese’s puts on another off.

It is not Martin Scorsese’s best film, but it might be his best photographed. This is a movie that is never, not for a single second, dull. It’s best known as the “inferior” sequel to the 1961 film The Hustler and as the film that finally won star Paul Newman his Oscar on the basis of his career rather than his performance. It’s better than its reputation on both counts. …more

Up in the Air is sentimental, but that doesn’t mean it’s simplistic. In fact, the movie plays at some interesting contradictions. It is a genuinely funny movie about genuinely depressing times. …more

For his role in Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! as corporate executive turned whistleblower Mark Whitacre, Matt Damon gained something like thirty pounds.  He didn’t need do it to look like the real Whitacre because none of us know what the real Mark Whitacre looks like. He did it because The Informant! is a rather crafty satire of whistleblower movies and that’s what actors are expected to do in whistleblower movies; put on a whole mess of weight to let us know how “serious” they are. …more

Quentin Tarantino makes movies about movies. …more

Deliver Us From Evil is a documentary, but it could be filed in the video store under the horror section. Few fictional bogeymen in the history of movies can hold a candle to a real-life monster like Oliver O’Grady, a former Catholic priest and serial child molester.

Director Amy Berg finds him living quietly in Ireland, defrocked and deported, but free to roam and interact with more children. O’Grady’s aware of his crimes yet eerily oblivious to their impact, and even hopes at one point that his former victims will come visit him, absolve him, and shake his hand (or give him what he really wants, a hug. Um, ew).

Still, as shocking as O’Grady’s nonchalant recollections might be, they’re nothing compared to the revelations contained in the legal depositions of his former church supervisors, who covered up his earliest crimes and facilitated his later ones by moving him from parish to parish rather than addressing the problem. Their squirmy, evasive testimony gives new meaning to the idea of religious confession.

The movie’s not perfect, particularly during a third act that flails about desperately for some sort of uplifting ending. Then again, these flaws only make Deliver Us From Evil scarier, by reinforcing how, in cases like this, true closure is impossible.

If, as Quentin Tarantino believes, the real core of exploitation cinema is found in images so crazy you cannot believe your eyes, then the new film about the history of Australian exploitation, Not Quite Hollywood, not only documents its subject, it embodies it as well.

For 100 lightning-paced minutes, director Mark Hartley takes you inside the era of “Ozsploitation,” when restrictive censorship laws were lifted and the first true Australian film industry — and a slew of nudie, horror, and action pictures — were born.

Hartley’s approach is in the great exploitation tradition, with lots of flashy editing and plenty of titillation. The result, by design, is light on serious critical or cultural analysis and heavy on batshit insane film clips (like the one where George Lazenby engages in a karate fight while his back is completely covered in flames), cheeky interviews (one is conducted in a working strip club) and hilarious on-set anecdotes (the one about the girl with the machete and the director yelling “Cut!” is worth the price of admission all by itself). It’s not the most comprehensive history lesson, but it is a highly entertaining one, and the final product is bawdy, vulgar, and thrilling enough to make its subjects proud. And if you’re a fan of genre cinema, you’re guaranteed to find plenty of fodder for your Netflix queue.

Few movies deserve an “Extended Cut” but I can think of few that deserve one less than Stripes, which was already twenty minutes longer than necessary in its original theatrical edition. Rather than expanding the film to a bloated 126 minutes, Sony should have created the first “Abridged Cut”: 80 tightened minutes of the best basic training high jinks and Bill Murray improvisations. …more

The title The Proposal has two meanings; it refers to the improvised marriage between shrew boss Margaret (Sandra Bullock) and exasperated assistant Andrew (Ryan Reynolds) devised to stave off her deportation, as well as to their jobs in the world of book publishing. But another possible title, The Sham, works equally well, not only to describe their romantic hoax but also the contrived, counterfeit nature of this entire cinematic enterprise. …more

It boggles my mind that Dario Argento directed a movie called Deep Red and it is not this picture. How is that possible? How could any movie not set entirely in a darkroom be more about the color red than this one? …more

This picture about traveling Bible salesmen had me thanking God I didn’t go into retail. At least not the kind in Salesman: you’re separated from your family, working out of shared hotel rooms, trying to convince poor Catholics they need to own a $50 (or, inflation adjusted, $300) Bible. …more

According to the opening credits, The Hangover is “A Todd Phillips Movie” not “A Todd Phillips Film.” …more

I took notes during the first Cannes press screening of Lars von Trier’s new film Antichrist but I don’t have them in front of me right now. I don’t need them. This movie is many things: shocking, troubling, angry, maybe even a little funny (though I’m still not sure whether the laughs are intentional or not). But it is not forgettable. …more

Even though Rawson Marshall Thurber’s film The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is based on a Michael Chabon novel of the same name, its title is misleading. …more

Being locked in a tiny prison cell for years on end, with nothing but a blanket and piles of your own waste for company, makes a man very attuned to the small details of life. …more

There are few sadder places on Earth than a minor league baseball stadium.  …more

It is the comic book movie equivalent of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho: a technically accurate but dramatically inert copy of its source. …more

The Friday the 13th teenagers, including those in the franchise reboot that opens this week, are a superior breed of dumb. The kind of dumb that makes someone who knows a killer is on the loose say, “I’m not afraid!” and then leave the safety of a house to trek out into the woods with only a wok for a shield.

…more