Letterboxd — Your life in film

Jingoistic bullshit baked to perfection, all clenched jaws and swagger as it delights in its characters' hard-earned competence. McTiernan and De Bont are a perfect match for the material, camera movements and editorial juxtapositions expertly ratcheting up tension and conveying scale. Couple that with unsurpassed model work and set design and you're left with a flawless windup toy, the exact opposite of the bloated American empire it lionizes. Connery is effortlessly watchable, Baldwin twitchy and arrogant in a way that…

Takes the inherent paranoia of videotape as a medium and magnifies it a thousandfold through almost nothing but suggestion—everything is murky, every fuzzy piece of the background a potential threat patiently waiting to grab you. Maybe the scariest part for me was when Mike turned on the radio in an effort to drown out the voices in everyone's heads—I genuinely have no idea whether the radio was actually saying "Open the door" over and over again or if my brain…

Simultaneously an excoriation of and a love letter to everything that happens to wander into its frame, a scathingly petty indictment of the art form Welles felt had abandoned him that cannot hope to hide his unyielding fascination with its possibilities. It's no mistake that the film-within-a-film, intended as a mockery of Antonioni and his peers, is the most stunningly beautiful footage Welles ever shot—he can't help but fill even his put-downs with exuberance. First and foremost, he must give…

We lost the movie musical when we lost the ability to be tasteless. Moulin Rouge is in this respect the apex of the form—it's an abomination of indulgence, not only willing but determined to stamp out any remnants of subtlety with bombast. The first forty minutes seem designed to push reasonable audiences to their breaking point—cuts are constant and frenetic, every performance is broadened past caricature and into the inhuman, and comedy is not relief but an assault of canned…

Where Chapter 2 was a masterpiece, a perfect fusion of visuals, physicality, and theme, this installment settles for merely being one of the best American action movies of the decade. The knife room brawl in particular still has not gotten old upon a fourth viewing—the sheer delight the film takes in extrapolating the levels of carnage possible with a single instrument is contagious. That's the modus operandi for the entire runtime—where Chapter 2 gave us a John who'd perfected gunplay…