Roman Polanski’s The Pianist is one of those movies that doesn’t just tell a story—it makes you live inside it, smothering you in a slow, methodical descent into hell. If you came looking for a standard World War II drama with sweeping battle scenes, a rousing musical score, and an obligatory moment where someone nobly…
Imagine if somebody made a crime thriller that’s actually two movies in perfect balance: a cop movie and a heist movie doing an intricate dance around each other until they collide in an explosion of gunfire and existential crisis. That’s Michael Mann’s “Heat,” a film that treats both sides of the law with such careful…
If you’ve ever watched an action movie and thought “This needs more… everything,” then John Woo’s “Hard Boiled” is your cinematic all-you-can-eat buffet. This is what happens when you take Hong Kong action cinema, crank it up to 11, break off the dial, and keep cranking anyway. Chow Yun-fat stars as Tequila (yes, that’s his…
Welcome to 1950s Los Angeles, where the men are crooked, the women are dangerous, and everyone’s eyebrows are perfectly sculpted. Curtis Hanson’s “L.A. Confidential” is what happens when you take film noir, inject it with Hollywood steroids, and tell it to solve a murder case that’s more twisted than a pretzel in a tornado. Our…
Fargo (1996): You Betcha It’s a Masterpiece Oh jeez, where do we start with “Fargo”? Ya know, the Coen Brothers could’ve just made a straightforward crime thriller about a kidnapping scheme gone wrong in Minnesota. Instead, they gave us a quirky masterpiece that’s basically what would happen if you dropped film noir into a wood…
Ever wonder what happens when you take a bunch of cocky test pilots, stuff them into experimental aircraft, and tell them to push the limits of human possibility? Well, “The Right Stuff” has your answer, and spoiler alert: it involves a lot of sonic booms and even more swagger. Based on Tom Wolfe’s bestselling book,…
Amadeus: When God’s Favorite Composer Was His Least Favorite Human Meet Antonio Salieri, a man who had the misfortune of being a pretty good composer in the same era as a certifiable genius. It’s like being a decent amateur juggler who has to follow someone juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle. Blindfolded. The film opens…
Ever wonder what would happen if you took the world’s angriest man and made him punch people for a living? Meet Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro), a middleweight boxer whose approach to both fighting and relationships makes Mike Tyson look like a meditation teacher. Scorsese’s black-and-white masterpiece follows LaMotta through his rise and spectacular face-first…
Category: DramaStarring: Orson Welles Widely considered one of the greatest movies of all time it was hard to go into this fresh as the move has entered and somehow stayed in the zeitgeist (Rosebud is a classic example) and I have seen this movie before a very very long time ago, so it wasn’t like…
Charlie Chaplin Silent Movie / Comedy – 1921 3/5 stars This one starts with an ingénue who has a baby but the father isn’t interested (doesn’t believe it’s his? Who knows with silent movies) so she is desperate to keep her career so she does the unthinkable and abandons the baby in a rich person’s…