Favorite films are the four most recent 5-star first watches, or films that I've bumped to 5 on rewatch.
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Pontius Pilate 1962
Pretty fascinating peplum that borrows as much from Josephus as from the New Testament, the first half focusing on the fraught realpolitik of Roman Judea: Pilate ruling via carrot and stick; the testy dynamic between him and the Sanhedrin and their willingness to outsource political violence to the local bandit class, headed by Barrabas; a tense standoff at the Temple of Jerusalem after Pilate orders Roman eagles mounted on the temple roof. We also get scenes from an unhappy marriage…
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Last Man Standing 1996
On paper, a pulp mobster-western Yojimbo rehash couldn't be more squarely in Walter Hill's wheelhouse, and I have to wonder if he had made it 8-10 years earlier in his career, before Tony Scott and Tarantino had rewritten the grammar for 90s action films, the end product might've yielded happier results. Both those dudes owe massive style points to Hill, yet Last Man Standing plays like a half-assed hat-tip to some of their more unfortunate tendencies with some lame Woo-isms…
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Detour 1945
"Hey, glamorous, gimme change for a dime, will ya?"
A 67-minute Poverty Row noir masterclass that's actually about poverty. The theme is how one bad decision can snowball when you're hard-up, the subtext is how stuff like this never happens to people with money, and the setting is the big empty you have to cross to get to the City of Angels. The companionship? Nightmarish. As fast, mean, elemental, and endlessly riffed on as they come.
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Lourdes 2009
At 17, I cheated death, walking away from a car wreck that should’ve, by all reasonable expectations, killed me. The car was a blue ’66 Dodge Dart that my friend Paul was refurbishing with his dad. They had just replaced the front bench seats but had yet to install the lap belts, though to this day I question if those were ever really in the plans. Noting their absence and Paul's propensity for driving like an asshole — and because…
