Bringing Out the Dead Is Another Spiritually-Conscious Winner From Martin Scorsese

Death haunts Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage). That's to be expected given that he works as an ambulance driver in New York City. But for Pierce, it goes deeper than that. During his graveyard shifts, he's constantly plagued by hallucinations of a young woman he couldn't save. Every sidewalk he glances at or stores he wanders into, there she is, reminding him of how he failed her. His entire job is dedicated to helping people & saving lives yet here's a reminder that he failed at that job. Over the course of Bringing Out the Dead, Pierce grapples with the state of his life while interacting with a host of characters who have their own relationship with the fine line between life & death.

Fight Club Proves Surprisingly Relevant in 2020

David Fincher is an unusual entry into the canon of modern-day acclaimed auteurs. He's a widely-revered filmmaker, and rightfully so, but he tends to eschew the types of movies that usually garner American filmmakers their enormously influential reputation. Fincher is known for his grimier thrillers that don't ease up on the blood or the violence. The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, Se7en, Gone Girl, Fincher loves seedy cinema. Considering his exceptional batting average as a filmmaker, thank goodness for his fascination with these darker corners of storytelling. Heck, the fact that his lone dud, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was a much more traditional drama indicates why Fincher stays in this lane so often.

Dead or Alive Begins and Ends With A Bang...Literally

Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive certainly begins with a bang, doesn't it? That iconic opening sequence is like the love-child of Edgar Wright & the Safdie Brothers on a hundred Red Bull's and also a healthy dose of bath salts. Said opening sequence depicts a bevy of human beings being taken out in violent ways by a group of criminals. The editing used to cut between individual locations is Road Runner-fast and none of the deaths are subtle. Noodles explode from one dying person's body instead of blood and the presence of drugs and sex is similarly pervasive in this stretch of bravura filmmaking. To watch this opening scene of Dead or Alive is to feel like you've just gone on the world's faster rollercoaster, your head is spinning, your mind is in shambles yet you kind of want to do it again?

Cast Your Vote For Alexander Payne's Best Move, Election

Matthew Broderick is an actor of stage and screen known for playing nice protagonists that your average moviegoer can easily root for. It's a trait of his that worked so well in Ferris Bueller's Day Off that people are still wearing "Save Ferris" T-Shirts all these years lost while the likes of The Lion King and Torch Song Trilogy also made strong use of his endearing nature. Yes, Broderick is talented at playing likable individuals but as Jimmy Stewart showed multiple times in his career, sometimes there's nothing more fun to watch than actors known for playing nice people going full-on creepy asshole. Broderick got to flex those kinds of antagonistic muscles with Alexander Payne's 1999 motion picture Election.

Steven Soderbergh's The Limey Is Brilliantly Written and Edited

SPOILERS FOR THE LIMEY FOLLOW

Typically, Steven Soderbergh movies have more than a touch of comedy to them. Sometimes the comedy manifests itself in more pronounced ways like in his features Logan Lucky or The Informant!, other times it emerges in more subtle ways, but usually Soderbergh delivers movies that are likely to deliver a chuckle for every bit of inventive piece of camerawork. His 1999 crime drama The Limey has moments of comedy to be certain, like an amusing sight gag of a server passing out drinks as police officers and ambulance workers try to take care of a dead body. But it's one of the more melancholy Soderbergh directorial efforts I've seen and that turns out to be the proper tonal choice for this specific story.

Oak Cliff Film Festival 2019: American Movie Humorously Captures The Grueling Independent Filmmaking Process

The Oak Cliff Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Dallas, Texas across multiple movie theaters, including the iconic Texas Theater.

The 1990s were the decade that redefined the American cinema scene through homegrown indie productions directed by the likes of Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino that provided an overhaul to the very concept of American indie movies. Suddenly, these rags-to-riches stories made it seem possible for anyone to make a movie. It’s fitting then that the decade would end with a documentary exploring how, even in this blossoming age of homegrown cinema, it’s still immensely difficult to make a movie. This documentary was American Movie, a Chris Smith directorial effort that celebrates its 20th anniversary this year and was screened in 35mm at the Oak Cliff Film Festival yesterday.

Paul Thomas Anderson's Sprawling Magnolia Is Incredibly Engrossing And Unique Cinema

There is no attempt to ease the viewer into the world of Magnolia, the film is just off to the races once the first frame comes up on-screen. Before you know it, the audience is tossed around multiple different storylines happening in close proximity to one another with a similar bleak yet darkly humorous tone permeating the majority of the individual subplots. As the camera frantically moves around from one person to the next, it may seem like this will be too much too fast for a viewer to process but in actuality, it's all too easy to adjust oneself to the unique atmosphere of Magnolia and the similarly idiosyncratic way it tells it's myriad of stories that all transpire over the course of a single day.

The Moments Of True Blue Success In American Beauty Make Its Flaws All The More Aggravating

Best Picture winners (with a few exceptions like No Country For Old Men or Moonlight) always tend to garner divisive reputations (if they aren't outright forgotten like certain films like The English Patient, Out Of Africa and Around The World In 80 Days have been) in the years since they took home that golden statue. 20 years later, Titanic still gets passionate debates on its artistic merits going while American Beauty seems to have that same effect, I'd been hearing about this Sam Mendes directorial debut for ages now and was mighty curious to see it for the first time and add my own two cents to the vibrant discussion.

Robert DeNiro Makes Billy Crystal An Overly Familiar Offer He Can't Refuse In Analyze This

Looking over Billy Crystal's IMDb recently, I was surprised to realize that the guy was never really a prominent fixture of American cinema. He's done a number of hugely popular movies like When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers and the two Monsters Inc. features of course, but aside from a brief period in the last few years of the 1990's, he was never a Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler or Melissa McCarthy type figure who was doing one or two comedies annually. The guy's etched his way into being a perennial staple of American pop culture by way of being a superb awards host and stand-up comic but he was the kind of the fellow who just seemed to do comedy feature films infrequently.

The Mummy (1999) Review

In the 19 year interm between the third and fourth Indiana Jones movies, we had a smattering of globe-trotting old-timey adventure movies looking to replicate the same financial success of o'l Indiana Jones. Most notably, we had the two National Treasure movies, the two Lara Croft features, Sahara, you get the picture. Also in the mix were probably the most financially successful features in this trend, the first two Stephen Sommers Mummy movies (there would be a third one in this series but it was released a little over two months after the fourth Indiana Jones movie), which updated the original Boris Karloff horror movie by adding larger-scale action and a lighter tone to the mix, which actually makes for quite the fun adventure.

Charming Craziness Runs Rampant In Spike Jonze's Debut Directorial Effort Being John Malkovich

I'll be right upfront and proclaim myself as a total Spike Jonze fanboy. When I saw Where The Wild Things Are as a thirteen-year-old, I had no prior experience with his filmmaking but the movie itself was so captivating and incredible that I knew I would never forget Spike Jonze's name. Just a few yeas later, Jonze managed to surpass his 2009 achievement with the masterpiece Her, one of the best movies made in the 21st century. Since seeing those two in their theatrical runs, I've also gone back and watched the superb Adaptation and have no finally rounded out Spike Jonze's feature film directorial catalog by finally viewing his debut effort Being John Malkovich, which paired him up with writer Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Adaptation.

It's Time For A Charming Romantic-Comedy With Blast From The Past

When the nuclear apocalypse comes (and considering Trump's daily tantrums, that may come sooner rather than later), we shall gather around fires and tell tales of the past, before the world came crashing around all of us. It'll be like that scene in Reign Of Fire where Christian Bale and Gerard Butler retell the Star Wars movies to a new group of youngsters in order to spark their imaginations and keep the power of stories alive. Yarns shall be spun and one such tale that shall be passed onto the post-apocalyptic denizens of the future will be the legend of leading man Brendan Fraser, who, for some reason, got abandoned by Hollywood in the 2010's despite showing some very clear talent as a leading man.

The Iron Giant More Than Earns It Status As A Masterpiece Through Incredible Storytelling

I am far from the first person whose ever wrote about how awesome The Iron Giant is as a piece of cinema. Coming at the tail end of the 1990's, a decade that had theatrical American animation reinvent itself as the a huge moneymaker after decades of dormancy after the death of Walt Disney, The Iron Giant was unlike anything else seen in that decades crop of animated fare. Most of the studios chasing the tail of Disney in this era, including the studio behind The Iron Giant (Warner Bros.) were looking to do the kind of musical fairy tales that Disney had turned into box office powerhouses, leading to a lot (and boy do I mean a lot) of animated fare that just boiled down to "Disney knock-off".

Unimaginative Scares Are The Name Of The Game For Blair Witch

For full disclosure purposes, let me briefly run down my thoughts on The Blair Witch Project. I love that 1999 horror movie, it's got a sense of restraint to it that's absolutely terrifying, tapping into just how scary the feeling of being lost in an unknown environment can be in an extraordinary way. Though the feature was divisive upon its initial release, it made a bunch of cash at the box office, spawning a sequel the following year (which I haven't seen) and now a second follow-up entitled Blair Witch.

Galaxy Quest Review (Classic Write-Up)

A Successful Quest For Comedy

A quality cast can make a world of difference in a film, especially when other crucial elements of the movie (like a script, directing or the score) are similarly firing on all cylinders. Galaxy Quest, thankfully, assembles a roster of talented names and then gives them a super fun story to work with that manages to work as a Star Trek homage, an exciting sci-fi adventure, a send-up/love letter to nerds and one of the best projects Tim Allen has ever been in (it's obviously never as good as the Toy Story movies, but it does circles around those terrible Santa Claus movies).