In neo-noir roles, Mickey Rourke’s faces change, but his power as an actor never does.
JoinedOctober 16, 2017
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Brian Brems is an Assistant Professor of English and Film at the College of DuPage, a large two-year institution located in the western Chicago suburbs. He has a Master's Degree from Northern Illinois University in English with a Film & Literature concentration. He has a wife, Genna, and two dogs, Bowie and Iggy.
In William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A., a quintessential Los Angeles crime thriller, artifice reigns, but so too does art.
Inevitably, the breach comes. More humans are lost, doomed to roam the earth themselves, joining the ranks of the undead. If the worst predictions about the climate crisis come true, we will only have ourselves to blame. The zombies were once, after all, us. And we have destroyed ourselves.
Ever since it's release in 1980, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate has been perceived as a failure. The film’s narrative and characters are obsessed with the idea of failure. The film itself, though, is anything but a failure.
The Set-Up is a 72-minute cinematic poem. Director Robert Wise, who cut his teeth in Hollywood as an editor, strips away many of the fight-film conventions that his contemporaries used quite liberally. There is no training montage, no meteoric rise and fall, no climactic bout between the fighter and his hated rival.
It's hard to know whether The Mule will be Clint Eastwood’s final film, either in front of or behind the camera—but it sure feels like it.
Manhunter stands in awe of Will Graham’s mental acuity, but it also never fails to confront the danger of that mind—and doesn’t blink at the consequences to Graham’s personal life or his own stability.
Walter Hill's Streets of Fire is a gutter fairy tale, propelled by the transcendent power of rock and roll.
Flip past The Good German on television and—were it not for the presence of modern Hollywood stars—you might think you’d landed on Turner Classic Movies.
We need to talk about guns. We need to talk about mental health. We need to talk about misogyny. We need to talk about violence. We need to talk about trauma.
The perverse sense of comedy within the world of Vice Principals invites laughter at profound darkness.
Early in the film, Cruise is a boy home alone, playing with his toys. By the end, he's an '80s man through and through—primed and ready to dominate in Reagan’s America.
