Have You Ever Seen

He was a big star before it, but Eddie Murphy became galactic after Beverly Hills Cop came out in 1984. His blockbuster hit remains funny all these years later even though it deals with some deadly serious subject matter like death and so much destruction. Martin Brest directed a tremendous action comedy, but his picture is even more impressive when you consider they were apparently winging it a l...

We put the finishing touches on this year's "Scary Movie Month" with a gab about a dynamite zombie flick from South Korea. Train To Busan is just as much an action movie as it is a horror movie. Director Yeon Sang-ho keeps up the intense pace by having his frenzied film play out almost in real time. He also hits most of the usual zombie beats by layering in class issues and the fear of your fellow...

The 412th Ellises' Analysis has us gabbing about ghosts as we continue with Scary Movie Month. The Others isn't truly frightening (especially once you've seen it a few times), but writer/director Alejandro Amenabar certainly knows how to make a moody chiller with a killer climax. This is a throwback to classic tension-builders from long ago that focuses on what you don't see. Amenabar lets terrifi...

Scary Movie Month is officially here! We start it with one of the landmark slasher flicks of the '90s, perhaps one of the greats of all time. Shockmaster director Wes Craven knew better than almost anyone how to make something like Scream work. His movie has a high body count and gallons of gore, sure, but it's also meta up the nose and it remains pretty funny. Craven also gives us one of the grea...

The 1931 version of Dracula was the first Universal Monster movie and it stars perhaps the most famous vampire actor of all time. Bela Lugosi was certainly committed to the part and this is obviously his trademark role. You'll just have to work hard to overlook his almost funny schtick. Is Lugosi any good as the Count though? Well, is anyone in this cast any good? Maybe one guy (Dwight Frye) nails...

Making a sequel to a beloved classic was always going to be tough sledding, but the talented writer/director Mike Flanagan simply couldn't make a great movie out of Stephen King's follow-up to The Shining. Maybe the failure with Doctor Sleep mostly lies with King's overly detailed book and all of its subplots. Maybe it's that we get far too much of the top-hatted Rebecca Ferguson and her fellow st...

2001 was the year of Puzzle Films and covering Vanilla Sky today means we've now tackled the 4 big ones. Memento, Mulholland Drive and Donnie Darko are all definitely better than Cameron Crowe's attempt to stretch himself and they're certainly not filled with as many maddening flaws. One big problem is that the casting is all wrong here. Both of Tom Cruise's love interests are duds and Cruise, alt...

This is the rare time we've ever posted an episode on Labour Day, but this movie DOES star the man who has to do "every dirty job". Harry Callahan is the quintessential good guy with a gun who has to combat a bad guy with a gun, but Harry is also a reckless vigilante in the Batman mode. This movie is also pretty much just a sadist chasing a sadist around San Francisco. Dirty Harry might be fascist...

"Persona" is Latin for "mask", which makes this Age Of The Mask we've been experiencing for the past year & a half an ideal time to talk about Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece. Well, it's one of his MANY masterpieces. Dude could direct. This is a trippy art film that gives us plenty to debate and tear apart. It's also been imitated half to death in the 55 years since it was made, which is perhaps why...

You know we're talking about a master filmmaker when this channel has already covered more than half of the man's titles and we're only now getting to this gritty crime classic. The Killing was early in Stanley Kubrick's career, so he wasn't yet at the top of his game as he would be for the next 40+ years. Still, there's plenty of examples of the technical prowess that would come to be trademark K...

It's not every comedy that features 2 of the brilliant stars of the Monty Python troupe, but it's actually the Americans who stand out. Kevin Kline was known as a serious actor before A Fish Called Wanda and Jamie Lee Curtis was still mostly thought of as the Scream Queen. So when legendary cut-ups like John Cleese and Michael Palin are overshadowed, you know you're in from something hilarious. Di...

Even though it's all about dark fantasies, depression and death, Harold And Maude is a cult classic that remains solidly funny half a century later. Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon are a fun/odd romantic couple in this unique love story. Gordon is the manic pixie dream lady who has even bleaker plans than the faux-suicidal Cort. We had a serious discussion about the grim subtext, but we didn't forget tha...

It's probably safe to listen to the 402nd Ellises' Analysis…although feel free to ask if it is again. And again. And again. Marathon Man is absolutely filled from start to finish with paranoia, torture and pain. Some of those themes—like the arrogant rich versus the desperate poor—have barely aged. The film's subtext remains oh so timely even 45 years later. The acting styles of Dustin Hoffman and...

The wannabe Ellises are here with our 401st analysis as we jaw-jack about the queen bees of Mean Girls. Lindsay Lohan was at her peak in this era and if you ever doubted her talent (admittedly, it's easy to forget how good she was because of the messy turns her life took), just take another look at this movie. Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert and Amanda Seyfried (in her debut) are also pretty great a...

Our 400th episode talks about one of the influential films of the French New Wave, which was also Francois Truffaut's directorial debut. The 400 Blows is famous for all kinds of reasons (especially that freeze frame at the end), but at heart it's a quiet character study of a young boy who makes bad decisions and has really bad parents. Jean-Pierre Leaud gives one of the great child performances in...

Who didn't think George Clooney practicing real estate law in the unglamorous parts of Hawaii and being cuckolded by the lanky guy from Scream would make for a killer comedy? Well, it might not be killer, but it IS a pretty good comedy. Of course, this particular movie star playing a loser is a stretch (even in Alexander Payne's unique "let's dump life on the leading character" style) but the Cloo...

We conclude Sci-Fi Month by going into the Mother Ship and praising/bashing one of the biggest movies of all time. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin have made plenty of action and disaster flicks in their day, but ID4 is their best…yet also one of their dumbest. It's also terribly fun, despite all the death and destruction. Will Smith became an alien-punching superstar, Jeff Goldblum quirked it up i...

Wait, hang on, another movie about a giant rabbit? Only this time the rabbit doesn't drink booze and pal around with Jimmy Stewart, but leads a teenager with mental problems down the path of scientific discovery and time travel? Well, yeah! Donnie Darko has been analyzed half to death and that's impressive considering how indifferently the picture was received 20 years ago. Richard Kelly was only...

We began our talk about A.I. at the ending of the movie because the last 15 or 20 minutes have always been controversial. Didn't it already have the most poetic ending possible before wishes started coming true? We debate that hot topic. Merging the visions of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick was always going to be an odd mix, but you might be surprised to learn which of them brought the negat...

Be Sci-Fi Month, be very Sci-Fi Month. The 395th Ellises' Analysis is the first of 4 flicks we'll discuss in June that identify with that creative genre. When you talk about David Cronenberg's 3 or 4 best pictures, The Fly has got to be a part of that shortlist. Sure, there's his trademark body horror and some jump scares and plenty of creepiness throughout, but it's also got more heart than almos...

It's only been about a month since this year's weird Oscars, but this was a good time for the 394th Ellises' Analysis to spend a solid hour unraveling the beauty of the heartfelt winner of Best Picture. As she so often is, Frances McDormand is quiet, stern and so real. She lets her fellow performers and Chloe Zhao's story come to her. Fern/Fran accomplishes more with a simple gesture than most peo...

Bonus episode! Taking a page from our COVID-19 specials last year, we each made 2 movie recommendations in this episode, using the caveat that we had to sell the flicks to you using only 19 words. Each of us also tossed around some trivia questions. And we opened up the emailbag! Gender identification at the Oscars came up. Unlikeable directors came up. Desert island movies came up. The Golden Glo...

You'll get 2 reviews for the price of one in the 393rd Ellises' Analysis because the sequel came up a lot in this chat about Dreamworks' groundbreaking Shrek. The snarky and often meta sense of humour that was so fresh at the time is still pretty gut-busting 2 decades later. Getting comedy superstars like Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy to provide the voices for the two iconic main roles was not as co...

Asghar Farhadi's fair and balanced examination of a crumbling marriage (two crumbling marriages, really) is a tremendous accomplishment. Farhadi deals in ethics, morality, sexism, secrets and a lot of lies. He's certainly got the cast to pull all of that off. His Oscar-winner shows empathy for all his middle-class and working-class Iranian characters and finds fascinating peel-back-the-layers ways...

Charlize Theron might very well have outdone her remarkable performance in Monster with her take on a narcissistic ghost writer of Young Adult books in this pitch-black comedy. Director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody reteamed 4 years after the Oscar-winning Juno to give us one of the great navel-gazers in modern film history. Their flick didn't find much of an audience 10 years ago, perhaps...