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!

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 […]

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 […]

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), […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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?

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.

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 […]