≡ Category: Action, Horror, Movie Reviews, Recommended | ≅ Leave a Comment
Country: Korea
Genre: Horror/Action
Director: Joon-ho Bong
Year: 2006
Rating:
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
The Host is a funny movie. And I don’t mean ha-ha funny. It’s been compared to Jaws, and to some degree, the comparison is apt. Both movies are very rich: they work as character pieces, there’s a political backstory, and then there’s the pure adventure and […]
≡ Category: Drama, Movie Reviews, Recommended, United States | ≅ Leave a Comment
Country: United States
Genre: Drama
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Year: 2000
Rating:
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
For a while now, M. Night Shyamalan’s films have been getting increasingly insular and absurd, but Unbreakable is early M. Night. It’s got Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis, and it’s goofily entertaining. The big twist, when it came, made me laugh, not so […]
≡ Category: Action, France, Highly Recommended, Movie Reviews | ≅ Leave a Comment
Country: France
Genre: Action
Director: Coline Serreau
Year: 1991
Rating:
TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
In order to have any chance of succeeding, Chaos has to overcome one of the most self-destructive pre-production choices ever made on a feature film. On a glossy, dramatic melodrama, to save money, some genius decided that Chaos was going to […]
≡ Category: Drama, Not Worth Your Time, Satire, Suspense, United States | ≅ Leave a Comment
Country: United States
Genre: Drama/Satire/Suspense
Director: Bruce A. Evans
Year: 2007
Rating:
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
A 12-Step serial killer movie — now, that sounds like fun! Actually, it’s sort of been done before, with Ben Kingsley’s You Kill Me, but in that movie, Sir Ben was a contract killer who had a drinking problem. And then there’s Showtime’s Dexter, […]
≡ Category: Drama, Essential, Hong Kong, Movie Reviews, Under the Radar | ≅ Leave a Comment
Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Drama
Director: Raymond Lee
Year: 1990
Rating:
MOVIES THAT PASS UNDER THE RADAR
Astonishingly, A Killer’s Blues is practically forgotten. At the time it was released, it was lost in the shuffle of any number of excellent gangster flicks that came off the Hong Kong movie industry assembly line like so many Volkswagen Beetles back in […]
≡ Category: Action, Classics That I Hate, Drama, Movie Reviews | ≅ Leave a Comment
Country: United States
Genre: Action/Drama
Director: Ridley Scott
Year: 2000
Rating:
CLASSICS I HATE
Let’s get something straight. I don’t hate Gladiator, but when a movie gets practically universal acclaim, wins the Oscar for best picture and isn’t very good, I figure it’s my responsibility as a critic to say something.
Ridley Scott is a damned good director. He made the […]
≡ Category: Art Films, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Korea, Movie Reviews, Worth A Look | ≅ Leave a Comment
Country: Korea
Genre: Drama/Comedy/Horror
Director: Joon-ho Bong
Year: 2003
Rating:
WORTH A LOOK
Alert readers might recall that I recently reviewed director Bong Joon-ho’s creature feature The Host. I thought it was an interesting deconstruction of a typical monster movie. Later on, when I became aware of another Korean movie called Memories of Murder, I noticed that Bong Joon-ho was […]
≡ Category: Action, Essential, Movie Reviews, United States | ≅ Leave a Comment
Country: United States
Genre: Action
Director: Paul Greengrass
Year: 2007
Rating:
TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
Let me start out by saying that I’m not a big fan of The Bourne Identity. In the first installment of the Bourne trilogy, Matt Damon just wasn’t convincing as super assassin Jason Bourne, even considering the amnesia angle. Whatever Doug Liman’s merits might be […]
≡ Category: Action, Drama, Korea, Movie Reviews, Not Worth Your Time | ≅ Leave a Comment
Country: Korea
Genre: Drama/Action
Director: Yong-sik Yu
Year: 2000
Rating:
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
I watched The Anarchists mostly because it was written by Chan-wook Park, the writer/director behind such worthwhile features as Sympathy For Mister Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance.
The film follows the adventures of a quintet of Korean anarchists in 1920’s Shanghai, who are determined to overthrow the […]
≡ Category: Action, Movie Reviews, Not Worth Your Time, Suspense, United States | ≅ Leave a Comment
Country: United States
Genre: Action/Suspense
Director: William Lustig
Year: 1989
Rating:
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
Once upon a time, director William Lustig made the sleazy and reprehensible proto torture porn classic Maniac, reviewed elsewhere on this site. Maniac had a certain integrity in it’s commitment to an icky 42nd Street grindhouse aesthetic, where you almost feel the sticky floors, and […]