Living for the Cinema

Every major filmmaker has to start somewhere....and this Neo-Noir thriller was the feature filmmaking debut for Joel and Ethan Coen forty years ago.  Yes the same brothers who have delivered many memorable films since then including Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou, Inside Llewelyn Davis, and No Country For Old Men for which they won Best Picture at the Oscars.  This is the simple...

As we approach Baseball Opening Day 2024, what better way to celebrate than to revisit one of the more beloved baseball films of the 1980's, a comedy with heart focusing on a true underdog franchise, the Cleveland Indians?  Directed by David S. Ward, the story focuses on one Cinderella season for the ballclub which is now under the control of a new owner (Margaret Whitton) who is determined t...

Welcome to the Living for the Max series.  Over the past 45 years, there has been no other film franchise QUITE as inventive nor as consistently exciting as The Mad Max Saga….four films mostly chronicling the post-apocalyptic adventures of lone wolf Max Roxatansky played three times by Mel Gibson and most recently by Tom Hardy.  As each film has been directed by Australian cinematic genius George...

What happens when a top-flight director (Walter Hill - 48 Hours, The Driver) decides to to spearhead a new original story blending various genres including gritty crime drama, rock musical, and star-crossed love story....also setting it within an unrecognizable urban setting and time period?  Well the result is one of the more bizarre financial flops of the 1980's which no one at the time tru...

Of all of the dozens of post-Pulp Fiction imitators to be released throughout the 1990's, this might be one of the more memorable ones even though it opened roughly 25 years ago to middling box office.  It director Doug Liman's follow-up to his seminal indie gem of just three years - Swingers - and while he once again kept the cast young and the locations limited to LA (and Las Vegas), h...

In the lead-up to St. Patrick's Day, what better time to celebrate than to revisit what is considered by some to be a modern crime drama classic focusing on the Irish mafia?  Directed by Phil Joanou (Three O'Clock High), this story focuses on Terry (Sean Penn) who has recently moved back to the old neighborhood - Hell's Kitchen in New York City - and decides to join a "Westie&q...

What better way to celebrate March Madness than to revisit a basketball movie which actually isn't a basketball movie but does still feature lots of basketball.....sorta? :) Benny and Josh Safdie followed up their breakout success of a couple of years prior - the extremely tense urban thriller Good Time starring Robert Pattinson - with an even TENSER crime thriller starring Adam Sandler as a...

This is the story of a bored suburban housewife Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) who finds herself drawn to reading personal ads and becomes especially interested in those featuring a mysterious woman named Susan (Madonna) who she ends up sorta stalking. And through a series of unfortunate events, Roberta inadvertently becomes mistaken for Susan while also getting amnesia. :o Along the way she ends up s...

Kicking off Women's History Month, here is a truly unique take on one of the most famous (or infamous) monarchs in the history of French royalty.  Kirsten Dunst stars as the eponymous Queen married to King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) - their reign lasted from 1774 through 1793 and happened to be during one of the most tumultuous periods in French history.  Though you would be forgiven for n...

Since we are apparently still several years away from the next Star Wars or Star Trek movie on the big screen, director Denis Villeneuve has given us the next best thing....or maybe something even better? :)  This long-awaited sequel to the Oscar nominated sci-fi blockbuster Part 1 picks up EXACTLY where the previous film left off.....Paul (Timothee Chalomet) and Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) now ven...

The Coen Brothers are back!  Well actually just one of them (Ethan Coen) but he's here to direct while also co-writing and co-producing with his wife and long-term Coen's collaborator Tricia Cooke.  And what they have collaborated to deliver is an ambling, quirky, violent crime drama/comedy in the GREAT tradition of previous Coen Brothers' films like Burn After Reading, Fargo, or Ra...

Welcome to the Living for the Max series.  Over the past 45 years, there has been no other film franchise QUITE as inventive nor as consistently exciting as The Mad Max Saga….four films mostly chronicling the post-apocalyptic adventures of lone wolf Max Roxatansky played three times by Mel Gibson and most recently by Tom Hardy.  As everyone has been directed by Australian cinematic genius George M...

Considering that he was one of the most influential musical performers of the 20th Century pioneering an entire genre (reggae) of music, it was only a matter of time before we were to see a big budget studio of biopic of the late, great Robert Nesta Marley hailing from Nine Mile, Jamaica.  His life was tragically short but his music has lived on decades after his untimely passing in 1981.  This fi...

Probably the best way to describe this movie would be as a "Kung Fu Musical Comedy" but that MIGHT not do it justice!  Produced by the founder of Motown Records (Berry Gordy) and directed by one of the early pioneers of African American cinema (Michael Schultz), it was a tale as old as time....of Bruce Leroy (Taimak), a young aspiring martial artist from New York City who aspires to beco...

Just a couple of years before the breakout success of his seminal horror classic, John Carpenter directed this low-budget action thriller focusing on the siege of a soon-to-be-closing LA police station by a some local gangs who are trying to take down a rival gang-leader being held in custody by the police.  As the gun fire and violence escalate, every one inside - both cops and criminals - eventu...

Poor Things is a high-brow steam-punk fantasy which just garnered the second largest number of Oscar nominations for 2023 including BEST PICTURE and has received universal acclaim for this surrealist tale of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone, also nominated for Best Actress), a young woman in Victorian England (?) who has recently been reborn/revived via a series of questionable experiments by a mad scient...

Once the Queen of Rom-Com's, Julia Roberts returned to the genre which made her a household name fifteen years ago and she also reuinited with Clive Owen, her co-star of Closer, their acclaimed drama about about five years prior.  And they were both being directed by Tony Gilroy who just about 18 months prior had directed the seminal legal thriller Michael Clayton.  It also featured the promi...

Forty years ago this summer, we saw the release of this seminal biopic/concert movie from first-time director Albert Magnoli.  It was the feature film debut of Prince who was a rising rock and pop phenomenon at the time and it featured wall-to-wall new songs from Prince and his band at the time, The Revolution.  Both the film and its soundtrack became instant phenomenons launching the late, great...

Fifteen years ago, we saw the release of one of THE most surprising word-of-mouth hits of the 21st Century and that was this straightforward action thriller directed by Pierre Morel.  It starred Oscar Nominee Liam Neeson as Brian Mills, an ex-spy/assassin with a "particular set of skills" who has just found out that his teenage daughter (Maggie Grace) was "taken" while on vacat...

Welcome to the Living for the Max series.  Over the past 45 years, there has been no other film franchise QUITE as inventive nor as consistently exciting as The Mad Max Saga….four films mostly chronicling the post-apocalyptic adventures of lone wolf Max Roxatansky played three times by Mel Gibson and most recently by Tom Hardy.  As everyone has been directed by Australian cinematic genius George M...

Ten years ago at the Sundance Film Festival, every one who saw it was just dazzled by this low-budget music drama directed by then up-and-comer Damian Chazelle.  And as the year progressed, so did more buzz before it was eventually released worldwide later that year to much acclaim and lots of awards attention.  In fact, this film ended up being nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture and...

NAVAL WEEK concludes with a highly acclaimed period seafaring adventure which just turned 20! Adapted from a series of beloved historical fiction novels from Patrick O'Brian, this film chronicles the journey of the HMS Surprise, a British seafaring vessel sailing across the Southern Hemisphere and in a continuous cat-and-mouse with the French Navy, this being during the height of the Napoleon...

NAVAL WEEK kicks off with what might be The LAST Great Cold War Thriller?? Could be as this adaptation of Tom Clancy's best-selling novel was released literally just a few months after the fall of the Soviet Union.  It all takes place during the height of the Cold War back in the early 1980's.  There's a brand new Russian submarine in the water which can be apparently run silent and...

What's this, a well-regarded science fiction conspiracy thriller which featured an all-star cast and yet no one remembers it?? Well yeah if this film happens to come out the same year as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind....two BEHEMETHS from this era directed by master filmmakers/household names George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg respectively.  Whereas this was directed by Pet...

Forty years ago amidst a crop of various pop music-driven movies (Flashdance, Breakin), this Herbert Ross-directed teen musical drama hit the world by storm and made a star of its lead performer, the legendary Kevin Bacon.  Beyond that, it also had a one of the most memorable soundtracks of the decades featuring several catchy pop gems including the EXTREMELY popular title track from Kenny Loggins...