An Overstuffed Script Leaves The Rainmaker Dry When it Comes to Engaging Characters

The Rainmaker may sound like the name of a supervillain origin story but it's actually a film adaptation of a John Grisham courtroom novel of the same name. The protagonist of the piece is young lawyer Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon). A devotee to the law and also the owner of a zoo, Baylor finds employment working for a famous lawyer by the name of Bruiser (Mickey Rourke). While working for Bruiser, Baylor partners up with Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito), who teaches Baylor the tricks of ambulance chasing. Eventually, Baylor gets entangled in a trio of court cases, the most prominent of which involves helping a family take down an insurance company that denied their son a life-saving procedure.

Bram Stoker's Dracula Is A Sexually Charged Piece of Cinema That Makes For A Delightful Watch

Bram Stoker's Dracula is one horny movie. It's so horny you might as well call it a crash of rhinos. It's so fixated on getting it on that one is surprised some James Brown tunes don't pepper the soundtrack. Director Francis Ford Coppola has assembled an A-list cast and some extraordinary production design, not to mention Bram Stoker's iconic source material, to create a vivid erotic fever dream about the one, the only, the vampire called Dracula. That description is meant to be a compliment, Bram Stoker's Dracula has refreshingly no inhibitions about what it wants to be is and fully embraces any opportunity to revel in both sex and hamminess, frequently at the same time.

The Documentary Spielberg Looks At An Iconic Career In An Engaging Manner

This morning, the nominations for the 90th Academy Awards were announced and among the nine films nominated for Best Picture was The Post, Steven Spielberg's newest directorial effort. With The Post securing a Best Picture nod, this meant, as pointed out by Mark Harris on Twitter, that Spielberg has now had eleven of his movies nominated for Best Picture, the second highest amount of movies a single director has ever had nominated in Best Picture (William Wyler has the most with 13 of his features scoring Best Picture nominations). That's an astonishing accomplishment and it's far from the only place where Spielberg's career has been marked with great success as anyone who's been to a movie theater in the last four decades can attest.

The Godfather Trilogy Comes To An Underwhelming End With The Godfather: Part III

And so, we come to the end of The Godfather trilogy, a saga of films adapting the literary work by Mario Puzo of the same name. Following his tenure helming the lasts two entries in this series, Francis Ford Coppola returns to the directors chair for this final chapter in the Corleone saga, though considering how starved Paramount Pictures is for content these days, I'm preparing myself for an inevitable McG directed reboot of The Godfather to get announced anyday now. For now though, The Godfather: Part III serves as the definitive end of one of the most acclaimed franchises in cinematic history, though this third chapter received initial responses that proved to be far more critical than its predecessors.

In Laman's Terms: Five Classic Directors Who Deserve A Major Comeback

In Laman's Terms is a new weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

While a number of directors from the big American cinema revolution of the 1970's (like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen) are still doing regular work in Hollywood, it must be said that quite of the few masters from this era as well as other prolific directors from other epochs of Hollywood have found shockingly little work in the modern day cinematic landscape given how many classics they've delivered in their career. As just a little fun exercise, I've compiled five notable directors, some of whom come from the aforementioned creative boom of the 70's, others who come from other eras of Hollywood, who don't get much in the way of work anymore but totally deserve more high-profile gigs, perhaps from the likes of studios like Netflix, Annapurna or Amazon who are now in the business of financing costly auteur-driven projects that major studios are hesitant to greenlight.

Few Sequels Are As Amazing As The Captivating The Godfather: Part II

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #38
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #31 (Tied witb Taxi Driver)   

For years, I've heard the usual picks of when people say best sequels; The Empire Strikes Back, Spider-Man 2, and of course, The Godfather: Part II. That 1974 Francis Ford Coppola has been held up as the paragon of sequel filmmaking for decades now and getting to actually watch it for the first time totally made me realize why The Godfather: Part II is held up in such high stature in discussions of cinema. This thing not only manages to surpass the quality of its already incredible predecessor but it also does a remarkable job of enhancing the world established by the first movie by lending a sweeping mythic quality to the Corleone crime syndicate.

The Godfather Doesn't Just Live Up To 45 Years Worth Of Hype, It Exceeds It

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #37
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #21 (Tied with L'Avventura and Contempt)   

In 1979, director Francis Ford Coppola would unleash a realistic drama called Apocalypse Now that emphasized the realistic emotional and mental turmoil experienced by soldiers dropped into Vietnam. Coppola dove right into a war that had grown bigger than any human being could imagine and dared to imagine what it must be like to live, to breathe, to exist in the midst of all that carnage. Seven years prior, this same guy was responsible for a minuscule indie you may have heard of entitled The Godfather that applied the same thought process of pondering what it's really like to live a life of pervasive violence to the world of mobsters.

The End Is Nigh In The Engrossing Apocalypse Now

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #9
Placement On Sight & Sound 50 Best Movies List: #14

Every single war in human history is a brutal affair from which no participant in it comes away unscathed. But the Vietnam War took on a whole other life of its own that made it a particularly gruesome affair. New innovations in cameras and TV news allowed people to see grisly first-hand footage directly from the battlefield, once that footage was actually allowed to be aired on TV that is. People were getting an up-close glimpse at the harshness of war for the first time and the fact that the Vietnam war ended in a loss for America only added a further layer of tragedy to what was already a cataclysmic affair.