Film

1996/2004/2005 A gutter-level view of the Danish mean streets, director Nicolas Winding Refn’s searing “Pusher” trilogy is hard as slate “? echoing the works of Abel Ferrara, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, Refn’s merciless, artful character studies are a hellish triptych, up close and unavoidable. While Refn’s grungy aesthetic may be too much for […]

2006    Six teenagers wake up in a grimy, abandoned factory, their every move captured via security cameras, asked by an electronically altered voice to participate in a game where the outcome is literally life-and-death. For instance, a guy has 60 seconds to disarm a bomb using a key surgically implanted in his gut, while […]

1973/1977/1990/2000/2004/2005/2006    One of the scariest flicks of all time, “The Exorcist” was more than a box-office blockbuster. It was a touchstone of pop culture. The macabre tale of a sweet-faced 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil signaled a new level of intensity for horror movies and spurred scores of lesser imitators that heaped on […]

1981/2006 Film noir is easy enough to imitate; just toss in a femme fatale, a rain-swept street and a few fedoras, and you’re set. It’s considerably more challenging to actually capture the essence of film noir, but writer/director Lawrence Kasdan got it right in his 1981 directorial debut, “Body Heat.”   Echoing such noir classics […]

1995/2006 Yadda, yadda, yadda “? what more could be said about “Seinfeld” that hasn’t been said so many times already? This acclaimed “show about nothing” certainly puts the current slate of network comedies in perspective; with its rapid-fire wit and zeitgeisty catchphrases (“No soup for you!”), it makes you think: When’s the last time you […]

2006   Horror remakes aren’t necessarily bad; witness John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” and Zack Synder’s “Dawn of the Dead.” But if you have nothing new to bring to it, why bother?   This summer’s redo of the 1976 classic “The Omen” deserves such questioning. Although aping the original’s story of a […]

1981/2006 A grand cinematic achievement and one which remains disquietingly relevant, Warren Beatty’s magnum opus “Reds” stands as the last of a now-vanished breed: the intelligent, costly and compelling Hollywood epic “? to think that studios once cranked out films that not only dazzled with lavish locations, but also put words worth considering in actors’ […]

  1964/1965/2006 A jarring piece of docudrama filmmaking that retains its power to disturb more than 40 years later, Peter Watkins’ searing film about nuclear war and its terrifying aftermath in a typical English city was deemed too intense and violent to broadcast by the BBC in 1965, becoming a theatrical release instead. Deliberately low-budget […]

1969/2006 Very much a film of its time, Robert Downey Sr.’s anarchic satire “Putney Swope” plays now like less of an incendiary social commentary and more of an antiquated goof “? bizarre affectations, such as Downey dubbing all of his leading man’s lines, lend the film an even more dated air.   The plot is […]