Advertised as a basic blanket action-thriller, but most surprisingly this turned out to be a drama with serious intent. Laughs will not be had, gun-fights are limited (the first appearing at 55 minutes) and the film suggests that not every problem can be solved by a lone hero. Speaking of which, the characters Johnson has played before have mostly been of a larger-than-life persona. This time he's the one who gets some beatings, searches Wikipedia for drug cartel information, doesn't…

Tay Garnett's fatalistic and mutually calamitous film noir opens with its protagonist drifter Frank (John Garfield) as he arrives at a roadside diner. It's a hot summer's day, he orders a burger, is greeted by the owner Nick (Cecil Kellaway), runs out to pump some gas, and leaves Frank alone in the diner. Suddenly a rolling lipstick tube crosses the floor towards him. In motion with the camera, Frank looks back to see where it came from. All we see…

In a decade mainly remembered for John Hughes' high school comedies, the iconic Porky's and hilarious Fast Times at Ridgemont High, there stood a revengeful, satirically anti-suicide black comedy on American teen society and pop culture. Heathers is morbidly nasty, ahead of its time and still relevant. Any movie which misleads a classmate that liquid drainer is a cure for a hangover is fantastically cruel and I love it. But you watch this film and realize how today's media would…

What's the point of even watching another war film when this one is so searingly embedded all over my skin? As far as I'm concerned, no other cinematic work has been able to depict such grueling and unrelenting savagery in its elaborateness. Klimov creates an emotional landscape which left me so wrought with sorrow, yet his surrealist elements were just as dizzying and euphoric in their foreboding intensity. We feel right there with Florya and our senses are traumatically assaulted.…