Directed by the Coen Brothers Blood Simple is like the thesis of the Coen Brothers' filmography.  It's a dark comedy about murder and characters in over their heads.  The film ends with a woman shooting dead a man who is not the man she thinks he is.  These are people who get themselves into trouble … Continue reading Blood Simple (1984)

Directed by David Cronenberg The Dead Zone has no sense of urgency.  It's a story about a guy, Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) who falls into a come for five years, then wakes up with psychic powers, able to see visions of the past, present and future.  After we establish his powers, we're left without a … Continue reading The Dead Zone (1983)

Directed by Jacques Tati Watching Playtime is like playing a two hour game of Where's Waldo?  The sets are big, the shots are wide, and Jacques Tati hated close ups, so the shots stay wide for long periods of time.  Instead of close ups or cross-cutting, Tati used sound to draw your attention to a particular … Continue reading Playtime (1967)

Directed by Sergio Leone The above image shows kids who would become gangsters, playing at being gangsters.  They dress like prohibition-era gangsters dress, they commit crimes and payoff cops in the same way, and yet they playfully skip through the streets like children.  They're kids who grow up too fast and will die too young. … Continue reading Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Directed by Orson Welles I suppose that what makes Touch of Evil so good is that it's a story about a corrupt cop that focuses on the cop.  Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) isn't just there to move the plot forward, he's there to underscore the thematic degradation of... something.  This film is a lot of things, … Continue reading Touch of Evil (1958)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh Steven Soderbergh has made a heist movie before.  He's made several, in fact, including Ocean's Eleven and its sequels, so Logan Lucky is nothing new to him.  This movie, though, is marked by its southern-ness.  It's so immersed in a world that doesn't try to be anything different than our own but which … Continue reading Logan Lucky (2017)

Directed by David Cronenberg What makes a movie good?  I think I've enjoyed so many of the movies I've written about on here, but Scanners, like so many of them, is one I have no interest in seeing again, and yet I appreciate a movie like this.  It's weird, gross, silly and full of occasionally bad … Continue reading Scanners (1981)

Directed by Jenny Gage All This Panic is a documentary that follows a group of high school girls over the course of four years.  They live in New York, and it's not hard to see them turning into some version of the characters from the television program Girls.  These girls start out as kids, though kids … Continue reading All This Panic (2016)

Directed by Tim Sutton Dark Night is a retelling of the 2012 Aurora shooting at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises.  What Tim Sutton tries to do here is give us a hyper-realistic glimpse into a day in the life of multiple people.  He does this through vignettes that offer little context, not even the … Continue reading Dark Night (2017)

Directed by Sergio Leone Sergio Leone didn't want to make Once Upon a Time in the West.  He had worked his way through westerns by this point, having made the Dollars trilogy, the memorable Clint Eastwood films that culminated with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  Those films, "spaghetti westerns," were Leone's reactions against the old … Continue reading Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)