Underneath its reputation, unseen and unloved, Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die is also a kind of secret miracle, one of the best L.A. crime films most have never given half a chance.
PositionContributing Editor
JoinedJune 1, 2018
Articles23
The exultant brilliance of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets is that, equipped with so very little, it was able to discover the truth; the tragedy of Targets, the terror of it, is that it still remains that truth.
In John Carpenter’s 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s haunted-car novel Christine, the road to hell is paved not with good intentions, but with time.
This is Withnail and I: Hilarious, tragic, less a cohesive narrative film and more a series of rowdy and ruddy vignettes—like stumbled stops along a pub crawl—designed to make one laugh until crying, and cry until laughing, in equal, sorrowful, comical measure.
David Cronenberg's Videodrome is a contradictorily compact cinematic expanse of carnality and carnage.
To watch Blow Out is to watch an artist confronting his deepest fears using the techniques and technology of the medium that had previously offered him salvation. That artist is John Travolta's Jack Terry. That artist is also Brian De Palma.
A crackerjack pulp thriller that alternately smirked and shocked its way into defining both a expanding cinematic genre and a director’s burgeoning career with its gallows vantage, Double Indemnity also maybe lets slip the secret of life as it nuzzles up against (and makes a joke, seduction, and parable out of) death itself.
Uncut Gems is itself an uncut gem—jagged and terrifying on the outside, yet encompassing a startlingly beautiful and cosmic humanism within.
John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a masterpiece, not in spite of its messiness but rather because of it.
A Journey Through The Funky Fanfare of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Mikey and Nicky is not the story of two men attempting to escape the mob, nor two men reckoning with themselves—it's the story of two boys wholly unequipped to mediate the complex emotions and responsibilities of male adulthood.
Breathless is at once a ferociously horny and formally audacious remake of Godard’s hyper-referential film, as well as an all-or-nothing, frenetically American and self-aware meditation on desperately empty people lost in the thrall of the pop culture that gives form to their wants and needs.
