Have You Ever Seen

Hero (or "Heroes", as it SHOULD have been called...maybe even "Superheroes") was a ballyhooed Chinese blockbuster that followed in the golden footsteps of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Both are beautiful, lyrical and impressive technically, but Yimou Zhang's cool-as-a-spinning-swordsman opus tops Ang Lee's remarkable accomplishment...from an aesthetic standpoint anyway. We just wished Zhang's st...

The one that made movie stars out of Damon & Affleck has been discussed by nearly everybody for the past 25 years, but we managed to find several new wrinkles in this well-written dramedy about friendship, love, grief and advanced math. Matt & Ben won Oscars for their quotable script and so did Robin Williams for his heartfelt performance as Damon's therapist. Williams is at his best in Good Will...

Invite all your monkey friends out for a day of river rafting as the 444th Ellises' Analysis dives into the goings on in "Apocalypse Before". Werner Herzog was still fairly new to making movies that are filled with verisimilitude when he made this incredibly authentic cult favourite deep in the Peruvian wilderness with his "best fiend" Klaus Kinski. The two of them had famous battles during this a...

The Quiet Man is not the greatest collaboration between the Johns (Ford & Wayne, natch), but it IS probably their most light-hearted. It's also a film jammed with Irish stereotypes. Of course, the director himself was Irish, so some slack should be cut. Other aspects of the story and the performances that don't age very well, however, are more of a problem. At least Maureen O'Hara is no shrinking...

Growing a conscience when you're an alcoholic, ambulance chaser is a longtime movie trope (right?), but very few of those guys have been played by Paul Newman. Unfortunately, not even one of the world's greatest actors could overcome some problems with David Mamet's script, namely that Newman's motivations for taking a "let's just settle" civil case to trial are selfish and wrongheaded. Taking on...

Orson Welles followed up his monumental Citizen Kane with this similarly-themed film about money, privilege, self-destruction and---say it with us---comeuppance. One of the most-influential directors of all time didn't even get to finish The Magnificent Ambersons though because the studio took it away from him in post-production. We can't have a talented-but-iconoclastic kid go and make 2 masterpi...

The Player turns 30 later this week and this satire hasn't lost very much of its punch. Hollywood is the land of phony (now more than ever!) and that atmosphere can be poison to artistic integrity, sure, but most other films of this type don't feature a guy getting away with literal murder. Yup, we wondered if Robert Altman's comeback film is even cleverer than it first appears. Could most of or e...

Before The Devil Knows You're Dead wasn't peered at by very many eyeballs 15 years ago, but Sidney Lumet's final film deserved to be seen by many and deserved to be a hit. Kelly Masterson's subtle script is award-worthy and the late & very great Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent as the lead of this tremendous cast. He shares the screen with pros like Hawke, Tomei, Finney and Shannon. The talent...

Luis Bunuel was a master director who was often ahead of his time. This isn't the only surreal movie he made, although it isn't always easy to figure out what's real and what's fantasy in this case. In fact, Belle De Jour had us questioning if ANY of this often-masochistic story is real. It's a difficult one to unravel because there's the forward-thinking focus on Catherine Deneuve's sexual empowe...

We cover a lot of movies about movies on this channel. For the 437th Ellises' Analysis, we're digging into what Lana Turner, Kirk Douglas and friends are up to in The Bad And The Beautiful. The story paints Douglas' studio boss as a charismatic devil, but Ryan has sympathy for said devil (yet again) because the bad man is just not bad enough. Perhaps Vincente Minnelli or his actors or even MGM pul...

Pete Docter has directed four of Pixar's very-best films, including Up and Inside Out. Soul makes him 4 for 4, even though it's just a step or two behind those other 2 masterpieces. It's hard to dispute that Docter & Kemp Powers helmed the best animation and design in Pixar's recent history, although we wondered if kids liked Soul as much as adults probably did when it came out. Were they interest...

Bonus episode! So what happened at the Oscars? Did people win awards for these mediocre movies while the Twitter-verse crapped all over everything and then the movie stars just happily & quietly went home? Well, of course not. Will Smith assaulted Chris Rock because of a joke and that cast a pall over the rest of what was otherwise an inclusive and fairly-funny show. We kicked this episode off by...

Fittingly, the day after a passably uplifting film wins Best Picture of 2021, we post a chat about The Lost Weekend. Billy Wilder was a genius at tragi-comedy, so he isn't at his best directing something like this. Still, his Oscars-sweeper remains an effective effort. Most of Wilder's legendary films were ahead in the '50s, but his Oscar-festooned 1945 "drinking'll wreck ya" drama is a vivid fore...

The 94th Academy Awards are only days away and for the first time in many years, we weren't big fans of a lot of the nominees. For that matter, we weren't huge fans of most of the 2021 movies in general. Judging by what many respected critics are saying, the Ellises are the outliers. Well, groupthink is dull anyway, right? We'll be tweeting live on the big night ( @moviefiend51  and  @bevelliselli...

Box-office hit Argo was well-loved and won some top prizes at the Oscars a decade ago. In a year that also featured the likes of Amour, Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty, was it worthy of winning Best Picture? Well, let's just say that Bev was not kind to Ben Affleck's crowning achievement. It doesn't help that the director (mis)cast himself in the lead role, which whitewashed the real CIA ope...

Let's take a trip to Germany in the early 1930s and check into the Grand Hotel along with MGM's all-star cast. It wasn't as common then as it is now to cast so many big names like Garbo, Crawford, Beery and the Barrymores in the same movie, but it paid off. This was a hit and went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Edmund Goulding's interwoven-character study represents the very first time in n...

We are thrilled to report that Call Me By Your Name remains a deeply moving film. It might have been even more effective this time than it was back in 2017. Armie Hammer's real-life controversies have caused many people to sour hard on him and his career is probably in jeopardy, but truth is truth: the dreamboat has more chemistry with Timothee Chalamet in this than you'll see in an episode of Bre...

The "Month Of Strange Love" goes to extremely trippy places in the 430th Ellises' Analysis as we try our best to decipher what's going on in Lost Highway. The American original David Lynch is a wonderful enigma who often gets big-name actors to go to strange places in his baffling art films that don't always make obvious sense. Look closer though and you also might notice that even this auteur oft...

I suppose you'd be wise to spend some of your Valentine's Day hearing us warble about Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent and friends do mighty good work in Away From Her. The 2 leads are quiet dynamite, but Olympia Dukakis, Michael Murphy and Kristen Thomson are a fair bit of gentle TNT themselves. Sarah Polley's debut as both a writer and director is a sensitive, lovely film about senior citizens. Wh...

February is our "Month Of Strange Love" and the 1st of 4 unusual sex and/or romance films we've chosen is the one about the Spade-ist and the Magg-osist. The 2 lead performances in Steven Shainberg's Secretary are the main event. Slinky sexy James Spader has been in other perverse pictures like this and he's always convincingly saucy. Maggie Gyllenhaal, on other hand, was not the obvious choice, a...

One of the greatest technically creative directors of comedies has got to be Edgar Wright. We love his enthusiasm, his warmth and his talent…although we don't actually love a lot of his movies. Well, hold on, one of us thinks Shaun Of The Dead is hysterical and the other thinks Wright's peak of greatness is Hot Fuzz. Both yuck-fests are jammed with homages and references and also a lot of cartooni...

Many movies made outside Hollywood are among the best of any given year, but the Brazilian-made City Of God remains a revered classic of this entire century. That's how several critics groups and Best Of lists feel about it, at least. It's not so simple for us. The slightly dated filmmaking techniques are a little much (especially the frenzied editing) and it's A LOT much to have to look at 2 hour...

We tackle a Michael Moore documentary for the 3rd time on this channel in this 425th Ellises' Analysis and this movie is about as politically divisive as anything the funny activist has ever made. The man has been remarkably influential from the beginning of his career, but especially after this highly successful documentary came out and asked if America is full of gun nuts...or are they just nuts...

Todd Solondz has been a master of "cringe cinema" for more than 25 years and Welcome To The Dollhouse is the misanthropic director at his peak. He understands what real children and real teenagers go through better than most filmmakers do and he certainly understands the effects of bullying. Heather Matarazzo's take on Dawn Wiener is nicely complex too because she isn't just a sweet victim of the...

We begin the 7th Annual Month O' Bev with a spirited chat about one of her favourite satires. Starship Troopers was a split decision in this 423rd Ellises' Analysis though because Ryan just doesn't have a good feeling about Paul Verhoeven's intergalactic war flick. It's deliberately campy and it's lathered in self-aware propaganda, plus the F/X are marvelous, but it also has tonal problems. Castin...