The disturbed world of pulp crime novelist Jim Thompson’s deformed psyches and demented morality comes to life in This World, Then the Fireworks (1997), one of the more unpredictable works in a career defined by the author’s disturbingly treacherous tales. What makes this dreamy adaptation by director Michael Oblowitz and screenwriter Larry Gross work is […]
A faithful remake, a spirited updating, and a deft, colorful, thoroughly entertaining heist film swimming in character and atmosphere, Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief (2002), his reworking of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur, may not be his best film, but it is one of his most purely enjoyable. The payoffs are many: Nick Nolte’s shaggy performance […]
Everyone is familiar with the landmark horror classics. This is one in a series of suggestions for Halloween viewing that may not be so familiar, including titles that teens and tweens (and in some cases adolescents) can watch without breaking the R-rating. In the midst of making their classic Christmas specials (like Rudolph the Red […]
Beasts of No Nation, the harrowing drama of a child soldier in West Africa, is directed by Cary Fukunaga (who helmed the first season of True Detective) and stars Idris Elba as a brutal rebel leader. It earned rave reviews on the film festival circuit earlier this year and was snapped up by Netflix, which […]
Paul Schrader spent decades of exploring the scarred psyches of American men who succumb to violence when pain overcomes reason, but nowhere as poignantly and powerfully as in Affliction (1997), his adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel. Affliction stars Nick Nolte as Wade Whitehouse, an unambitious, jocular small town sheriff and odd job man to a […]
Comic, actress, and Saturday Night Live alumnus Julia Sweeney had just moved to a cozy little bungalow in LA. Her life was buzzing along quite nicely, thank you very much, and she planned days of writing, evenings of dinner parties and smart conversations, and nights of quiet solitude. “That’s when God said ‘Ha!’” confesses Sweeney […]
In the early 2000s, an urban legend circulated about a young Japanese woman who watched film Fargo and travelled to Minnesota to search for the treasure buried in the snow. Filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner turned that apocryphal story into Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (2014), a deft, a sweetly offbeat indie drama starring Rinko Kikuchi […]
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third and final installment of Peter Jackson’s supersized take on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy, opens with a spectacular dragon attack on Laketown and tops it with a battle that nearly dwarfs the Middle Earth-shattering war Lord of the Rings trilogy (pun intended). It’s Elf and Man against […]
Is it mere coincidence that David Lightman, the high school hacker played by Matthew Broderick in WarGames (1983), comes from the future tech hub of Seattle, home to Microsoft and Boeing? Lightman, a kid not above hacking the school computers to change a grade or two, inadvertently hacks the nation’s super top secret military supercomputer […]
