Top Gun: Maverick is truly a shameless piece of emotional manipulation that has absolutely no reason to exist apart from abusing the audience’s nostalgia for the 1986 Top Gun, which was a block of 80s cheese, hearty and pungent. In turn, this movie is a two-hour artistic installation about nostalgia for cheese where good money was spent to tell me how great this 80s cheese was without either letting me taste it or showing me a good modern recipe that…
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Army of the Dead 2021
If there's a way to salvage a painfully mediocre movie, it is to imagine you're watching something else. And it just so happens that Army of the Dead is a stealth remake of Aliens, which turns the viewing experience into an Easter egg hunt. Which is nice.
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The Stepford Wives 2004
The Stepford Wives proves that Tim Burton films should be only made by Tim Burton. Maybe occasionally Joe Dante.
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L.A. Confidential 1997
L.A. Confidential shows perfectly how the genre of film noir should be effectively translated into more modern filmmaking environment. While it is decisively unmemorable in terms of visual set pieces, it does what Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger would have found impossible to convey at the time the genre was at its peak. It's gruesome, shady, violent and audacious enough in traversing the moral swamp of its central narrative intrigue to make sure the viewer comes away transfixed.
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The Black Dahlia 2006
The Black Dahlia is piece of noir so overstuffed with inconsequential plotting that it renders its underlying mystery utterly toothless and the entire experience frustrating.
For more thoughts on this film, listen to the Uncut Gems Podcast Episode 62 (available here).
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Terror Train 1980
Terror Train proves that applying a gimmick onto a slasher template may not be enough to secure a compelling viewing experience. Without memorable characters, interesting kills and - I cannot stress that enough - organically derived suspense, this movie is not the momentous juggernaut it could have been but a flaccid coaster slumbering down the tracks until its own inertia slows it to a halt and puts the viewer to sleep.
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Snake Eyes 1998
Why does a dog lick its balls? Because it can.
Why does Brian De Palma hire a thousand extras and records a twenty-minute-long take of Nic Cage half-improvising his control insanity in an effort to set the stage for a quasi-Hitchcockian political thriller about rockets, ladies in red and tidal waves out of nowhere? Because someone gave him seventy-three million dollars to do it. That's why.
For more thoughts on this film, listen to the Uncut Gems Podcast Episode 61 (available here).
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Dune 1984
Dune is a phenomenal companion piece to Star Wars, a self-contained piece of dense space opera thriving on the combination of its grandeur and a rogue treatment of the sacred source material that also falls on its sword when it tries to keep the viewer invested in the obscenely complex and un-marketable political intrigue underpinning its central plot. However, Lynch's vision is more than enough to make sure Dune will forever be remembered as much more than an 80s oddity…
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Rear Window 1954
Rear Window is a transformative experience to anyone who sees themselves as a storyteller. Superficially slick, efficient and pervasively effective as a canonical thriller, this is a timeless exercise in deconstructing obsessions driving those of us who look at people across the yard and imagine stories we could tell.
For more thoughts on this film, listen to Uncut Gems Bonus Tie-in episode 04 (available here) or directly through our (Patreon).
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The Peacemaker 1997
For some reason Mimi Leder is almost never mentioned in a conversation about trailblazing female directors who broke into Hollywood and made propulsive blockbusters, like it was second nature to them. The Peacemaker rocks, I'll have you know.
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Dressed to Kill 1980
Dressed to Kill is how you remake Psycho without formally remaking it.
For more thoughts on this film, listen to the Uncut Gems Podcast Episode 60 (available here).
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Motion Picture (Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory) 1984
Sometimes I feel I don't understand art. Or maybe art doesn't understand me.
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