Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1981/2007) – Ridley Scott’s visionary reworking of Philip K. Dick’s novel, “Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep,” was a box-office flop. Maybe it was too dark for a public flying away on the fantasy of E.T. in the summer of 1982, or too downbeat for audiences looking for a Harrison […]
One of the defining films in the elevation of comic book movies to adult fare, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) rebooted the Batman mythos for the big screen, bringing the often lighthearted hero back to the shadows, both figuratively and literally. It’s quite a leap from the previous Batman revival launched by Tim Burton’s 1989 […]
In Sin City (2005), Robert Rodriguez pulls out all stylistic stops to translate the most graphic of graphic novels—Frank Miller’s Sin City tales, all hard-boiled tributes to pulp fiction and film noir—from two-dimensional pages to free-floating big screen action, and he drafted Miller to help master not just the look, but whole hard-boiled extremism. Men […]
“I have no home. I sleep under bridges. A different bridge every night. But I am a man of honor.” Rutger Hauer delivers his most delicate and nuanced performance as Andreas Kartak, a homeless alcoholic in Paris in Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988), Ermanno Olmi’s adaptation of Joseph Roth’s novella. Andreas, who frequents taverns […]
Originally concocted as a faux trailer for the Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse Trailer Competition and later expanded in an utterly unhinged feature in its own right, Hobo with a Shotgun (2011) is a blood-spattered love letter to the grindhouse vengeance movie by first-time filmmakers who, as Spinal Tap might put it, crank everything […]
The Last Kingdom: Season 1 (2015), based on the first two novels in Bernard Cornwell’s “The Saxon Stories” series of historical novels, retells the story of King Alfred the Great, the ninth century Saxon King of Wessex, through the eyes of Uhtred of Bebbanburg (Alexander Dreymon). Born a Saxon but captured and raised by a Danish […]
