I have one serious gripe against the 1991 Bruce Willis action movie directed by Tony Scott. IMDb, Wikipedia, and just about every other reference source I can find today insist on spelling the title as The Last Boy Scout (four words total), even though the movie’s poster art and opening credits clearly (as I read… Read More Friday Night’s a Great Night for Football | The Last Boyscout (1991) Blu-ray
The appeal of films by Jim Jarmusch, especially his early work, is difficult to explain to someone who’s never watched one, and frankly even to some who have. His movies don’t exactly feel or behave like anything you’d expect from a regular movie. 1989’s Mystery Train, for example, has little story or plot to speak… Read More Some Days Just Go Like That | Mystery Train (1989) Criterion Collection Blu-ray
With a narrative premise that sounds like a gimmick, if not the basis for a comedy, The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey is in fact a very heavy drama with significant physical, emotional, and spiritual stakes for its characters. Although imperfect, the movie is quite an impressive artistic achievement that seemed at the time to signal… Read More No Escape from the Real World | The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988) Blu-ray
Adapted from a supposedly unadaptable 1928 novel by legendary author Virginia Woolf, Orlando was a key work of the early 1990s independent film movement and continues to reverberate in select areas of popular culture decades later. Spanning a period of some four hundred years, the story is a sweeping meditation on historical significance, personal identity,… Read More There Can Be No Doubt About His Sex | Orlando (1992) 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
The human mind’s dream state has fascinated filmmakers since the earliest days of cinema. Arguably, no other artistic medium has come closer to being able to capture and depict the peculiar logic, or illogic, of dreams than the movies have. The animation medium seems well-suited to that task, and Japanese anime in particular even more… Read More She Really Is a Woman of Your Dreams | Paprika (2006) Blu-ray
With the huge success of Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven, Westerns made a big comeback on cinema screens in the early 1990s. Not all of them were awards bait, however. The likes of Tombstone or Young Guns II were just rowdy fun, while director Sam Raimi (creator of the Evil Dead franchise) dabbled with a… Read More Do We Have Any Real Gunmen in This Room? | The Quick and the Dead (1995) 4K Ultra HD
Still smarting from the critical lashing he took for his troubled 1990 adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities, director Brian De Palma retreated to what he felt was safer ground, on both figurative and literal levels. For his next outing, Raising Cain would be a return to the type of Hitchcock-flavored suspense thriller that… Read More Psycho Therapy | Raising Cain (1992) Blu-ray
A movie that could only possibly have been created at the specific moment it was made, yet also simultaneously ahead of its time, Streets of Fire perplexed both critics and audiences during the summer of 1984, but has endured as a delightful cult property that, quite honestly, only gets better with age. I’ve watched the… Read More There’s Nothin’ Wrong with Goin’ Nowhere, Baby | Streets of Fire (1984) 4K Ultra HD
In real life, the prospect of investigating a murder is a grim business that should be conducted with the utmost seriousness and fastidious attention to detail. Yet movies and TV frequently present the job as being so much fun, the type of thing a clever person or team can do in their spare time for… Read More Wouldn’t You Like to Do a Little Detecting Once in a While, Just for Fun? | The Thin Man (1934) Blu-ray
Remembered largely as one of the better Die Hard knockoffs that proliferated in the late 1980s and most of the following decade, the 1992 action thriller Under Siege makes almost no pretense of being anything other than what it is. The movie earned the nickname “Die Hard on a battleship” immediately upon release and wears… Read More This Is Not the Work of a Cook | Under Siege (1992) 4K Ultra HD
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