Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), ostensibly a remake of the Howard Hawks gangster classic, moves the iconic rise and fall crime opera from the tommy-gun gangster street battles of prohibition era Chicago to the cocaine wars of Florida in the eighties. In the process, De Palma, screenwriter Oliver Stone, and star Al Pacino carved out […]
Limitless (2015-2016), the small screen spin-off of the 2011 science fiction thriller of the same name, takes the same premise—a pill called NZT turns ordinary people into geniuses by essentially transforming their brains into supercomputers—and gives it to a new character: amiable slacker and lifetime underachiever Brian Finch (Jake McDorman). The twist is that the […]
“You remind me that money won is twice as sweet as money earned.” Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986) hasn’t the ragged beauty and personal charge of Mean Streets, the ambition or the intensity of Taxi Driver, or the cinematic density of GoodFellas. Yet it is possibly his most accessible film and his answer […]
