When John Woo, the action maestro of Hong Kong cinema, is working at the top of his game, he transforms violent action cinema into a ballet of blood and bullets that matches the emotional intensity of his character drama. Face/Off (1997) is his second American film but the first to reach the pitched level of […]
“There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?” The opening line of Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War (2005) captures the film in a phrase: it’s serious, it’s sardonic, and it has both a […]
Kick-Ass (2010) is a comic book movie with a killer premise: what if regular people in the real world became costume vigilantes like the superheroes in comic books? Based on the uber-violent comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., this film tosses a high school teenager (Aaron Johnson) into a crime-fighting culture he isn’t the […]
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is disillusioned idealist Edward Snowden in Snowden (2016), Oliver Stone’s drama about the controversial NSA whistleblower. Framed by the famous meeting in a Hong Kong hotel room where Snowden (played with modest integrity by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) shared top-secret files revealing illegal surveillance programs with journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and documentarian Laura Poitras […]
Nicolas Cage is perfectly cast in the devious black comedy Vampire’s Kiss (1989) as a New York literary agent whose latest one night stand lands him in bed with vampire Jennifer Beals, who takes a big, bloody bite out of his identity. The emotionally unstable executive develops an aversion to sunlight, a fear of crosses, […]
Neither remake nor sequel in any conventional sense of the terms, Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans (2009) takes the basic premise out of the Abel Ferrara universe of guilt and redemption and drops it into post-Katrina New Orleans and the Herzog world of indifferent and unforgiving nature. It really is a […]
Dog Eat Dog (2016) – Paul Schrader brings his intelligence to a squalid pulp crime drama of small-time thugs who impulses and instincts manage to screw up what should be a simple job. Nicolas Cage is Troy, the ostensible ringleader of the trio, recently paroled and celebrating his release at a strip club with fellow […]
