Intended as his final movie for the Hong Kong film industry before leaving for the bigger paydays awaiting him in Hollywood, 1992’s Hard-Boiled was also something of a Greatest Hits package for director John Woo. Featuring his frequent leading man Chow Yun-Fat, the film playfully recycles many of the themes and tropes the two of… Read More Tequila Straight Up | Hard-Boiled (1992) Hong Kong Rescue Blu-ray
If the financial failure of Blade Runner in 1982 posed a serious setback for the director, his next feature project, Legend, was the film that broke Ridley Scott. Although his career would recover and he’d go on to be nominated for several Oscars over time (some of dubious merit, if you ask me), the film’s… Read More No Light without Darkness | Legend (1985) Arrow Video Limited Edition Blu-ray
In the decade between its disastrous theatrical failure in 1982 and the more triumphant reception of its 1992 Director’s Cut, Ridley Scott’s science-fiction masterwork Blade Runner endured as a cult item with a small but loyal fandom. The film’s fortunes started to turn around with the accidental discovery of an unfinished workprint version screened as… Read More You Were Made As Well As We Could Make You | Blade Runner: Workprint Cut (1982) Blu-ray
Despite inexplicably failing at the box office during its original release in its native Hong Kong, director John Woo’s 1989 action thriller The Killer became a major hit throughout the rest of the world during international distribution, and even decades later is still regarded as one of the greatest action movies ever made. You’d think… Read More A Ballet of Bullets | The Killer (1989) Hong Kong Rescue Blu-ray
Following a brief and frankly uneventful theatrical release a few weeks ago, the latest feature from acclaimed filmmaker David Fincher arrives at what was always intended to be its true home on Netflix. Based on a French graphic novel series from 1998 that the director had been circling for adaptation at least as far back… Read More Stick to the Plan | The Killer (2023) on Netflix
Even among fans who love it, David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune must be acknowledged as a very messy production with a terrible reputation. One of the most expensive movies ever made at the time, the result was met with critical scorn and box office disaster upon its release in late 1984. Four decades later, author… Read More Our Test Is Crisis | A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune (2023) Book Review
The Blumhouse production of Five Nights at Freddy’s turns the favorite horror-themed, point-and-click video game series of ‘tweens everywhere into a live-action fright flick. For that target audience, this may well be the movie event of the year. Everyone else will probably wonder what the fuss is about. Distributor Universal Pictures made an interesting decision… Read More Family-Friendly Fun and Cutting Edge Animatronic Technology | Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023)
For his latest cinematic interrogation, Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris (The Fog of War) trains his cameras onto David Cornwell, better known to fans and the public at large by his pen name, John le Carré. Over a sixty-year career, the acclaimed author published dozens of hugely popular and influential novels, mostly in the espionage genre.… Read More A Perfect Spy Novelist | The Pigeon Tunnel (2023) on Apple TV+
The latest adaptation of the famed courtroom drama The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial arrives under the cloud of a double sadness, for the dual losses of co-star Lance Reddick and director William Friedkin, both of whom passed away in the time between the film’s completion and its premiere on the Showtime cable network. In the case… Read More The Final Friedkin | The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023) on Showtime
If the nearly three decades since Scream have given us an abundance of meta slasher movies, including a whole bunch of sequels to Scream itself, the new Amazon film Totally Killer tries to do one better by throwing in the added twist of being a meta time travel/slasher movie. Its heroine has seen plenty of… Read More Scream to the Future | Totally Killer (2023) on Amazon Prime Video
