As far as 1990s-era director/screenwriters with wordy, erudite dialogue go, Whit Stillman is easily one of the best, topped perhaps only by Quentin Tarantino ("street" erudite?) and Hal Hartley. My favorite movie of his, by a hair over the brilliant but uneven Damsels in Distress, is this one, The Last Days of Disco, starring the great (and underused) Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckingsale as two young women just out of college trying to make it in the publishing world. They…
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
-
Fireworks 1997
Can a film be both fiercely beautiful and brutal? Well, based on the experience watching Takeshi Kitano's Hana-bi, the answer is a resounding YES. As with his earlier movies like Violent Cop, Kitano also stars as a disgraced cop whose face is without affect and who is, at best, anti-social. Here, after a botched sting operation resulting in the deaths of two of his colleagues, Nishi (Kitano), now off the force, resorts to taking money from the yakuza to pay…
Popular reviews
More-
Videodrome 1983
David Cronenberg's unmitigated masterpiece is Videodrome, a fucked-up fetish movie of the highest order, about what we all really want out of our screens: to be become what's in them! Though made in 1983, this prescient Canadian sci-fi movie is about a public access channel that shows snuff and transmits a mysterious signal with hallucinogenic, mind controlling effects. A low level satellite TV channel executive, Max (played by James Woods), who attracts viewers with sensational programming, gets wind of "Videodrome,"…
-
Double Indemnity 1944
In the debates about the first film noir movie, given that it is a retronym, a term applied retrospectively (to a body of work, in this case), many titles come up. One biggie is John Huston's 1941 movie The Maltese Falcon. In many ways, though, Billy Wilder's 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity is the ur-text of film noir, as it does far more of the heavy lifting than Huston's movie to establish the visual vocabulary of film noir as well as…
