Walter Hill pretty much created the contemporary buddy action movie with gritty crime thriller grounded in the great chemistry of the leads.
Tag: Paramount
Are we not men? – ‘Island of Lost Souls’ on Criterion Channel
“Are we not men?” Charles Laughton stars in the first screen version of the H.G. Wells novel and (for all the changes from the novel) still the defining one.
Last chance: ‘Star Trek’ – A new beginning on Netflix
J.J. Abrams dares to rewrite Trek lore with an origin story that chronicles the first voyage of the Enterprise crew with a mission that sends them into a whole new chapter of Federation history.
Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’ trilogy on Peacock
“It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.” Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestseller remains the great American epic of the immigrant dream turned family business. Al Pacino stars as Michael Corleone, the clean-cut white sheep and patriotic soldier boy son of New York Godfather Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando in an Oscar–winning performance), and this […]
‘Arrival’ – First contact on Hulu and Paramount+
Arrival (2016) is the most cerebral of first contact films, a science fiction drama about communicating across cultures and across species and even across time without a common language, while failing to communicate within our own world. It is a film that looks out beyond our galaxy and inward to our own souls, to challenge […]
Oscar-winner ‘Fences’ on Peacock
Fences (2016) – Denzel Washington and Viola Davis earned Tony Awards for their performances in the 2010 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s play “Fences,” the story of a working class African-American family in 1950s Pittsburgh. With the blessing of Wilson’s widow (the playwright passed away in 2005), Washington brought the play to the big screen, […]
‘Halloween H20: 20 Years Later’ on Paramount+
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) – The legacy of the horror movie sequel was nicely summed up in Scream by Jaime Kennedy’s film geek character: more bodies, more elaborate deaths, more gore. Director Steve Miner (a veteran of two Friday the 13th sequels), star Jamie Lee Curtis, and company took the high road in […]
Rock Hudson has ‘Seconds’ on Paramount+ and Kanopy
John Frankenheimer’s nightmarish thriller Seconds (1966) opens on John Randolph as a businessman who has lost all interest in his life and tries an experimental program which promises a new, exciting existence. When he wakes up from the first step, he discovers he’s turned into… Rock Hudson! Hudson was not Frankenheimer’s first choice—he was, in […]
Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’ on Criterion Channel
It’s common knowledge that filmmaker Richard Linklater and his four central actors—Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as the parents, Lorelei Linklater (the director’s daughter) as the older sister, and Ellar Coltrane as Mason, a six-year-old boy as the film begins—shot Boyhood (2014) over the course of 12 years to watch not just Mason but everyone […]
TVD: ‘Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series’
Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series (Paramount, Blu-ray, DVD) More than 25 years after the original Twin Peaks ended on network TV in 1990, creators David Lynch and Mark Frost were given complete freedom to produce a sequel series for Showtime. Almost every member of the original cast returned to reprise their characters (including a […]