Favorite films
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
If you were doing a double feature of this and Carl Franklin's other great movie One False Move, putting Devil in a Blue Dress second would be not only following chronological order but also a form of aftercare for the audience, because unlike the previous film which annihilated the whole idea of friendly interaction in its opening scene, this one even in its grimmest moments has a kind of warm glow to it that makes you kind of want to hang…
This deserves to be a lot better known as an intense small-town-vs.-L.A. neo-noir, with a lovely Bill Paxton performance, a tightly constructed screenplay that keeps up a great doomward momentum while focusing on solid character work, and a director who understands exactly what to do with it all.
It's one of Paxton's dangerous-doofus roles, but not the wild violent kind: this guy does harm in other ways, as a cheerful dim cop in massive denial about his own personal history…
A documentary that's about a very specific subculture scene, as experienced by a small number of people who are going to tell you why it was so historically important, can easily have a feeling of "OK, I'm glad that was so great for you, but I guess you had to be there." Rebel Dykes isn't exactly about a single scene: even though it focuses heavily on the London BDSM club Chain Reaction in the late '80s, it opens with the…
In terms of the production design, photography, casting, and overall concept, this is great. It's sometimes well directed, usually in ways that don't involve dialogue. It's certainly worth seeing as a piece of cinema. Otherwise........... oof.
If you're going to keep strictly to the text, as this does—I mean, some stuff is cut as it always is, and there are a few big changes in context which I'll get to, but it's still Macbeth as written—there are lots of ways…