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<em>El Mariachi</em> Is A Feast Of Bloody Micro-Budget Silliness
There's a moment early in El Mariachi, the micro-budget 1992 movie that introduced Robert Rodriguez to the world, where our hero, an unnamed wandering musician, asks a bartender if he can work there, singing for tips. The asshole bartender laughs in his face and says that he'd never pay one guy ...
Brett Favre Was The Third Choice For <em>There's Something About Mary</em>
Brett Favre's memorable cameo in There's Something About Mary wouldn't have happened if the Farrelly Brothers had gotten their way (and if Drew Bledsoe hadn't injured a woman stage-diving at an Everclear concert)....
The Rad '90s Western <em>Tombstone</em> Is Val Kilmer's Finest Hour
Since I started writing this column, I've been wondering what to do with westerns. They aren't quite action movies, but they're action-adjacent. It feels a bit ridiculous to discuss Once Upon a Time in the West in the same space I'm using for stuff like Dredd and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning....
Jet Li, Ass-Kicking Jerk: The Amazing Absurdity Of <em>Fearless</em>
There are early scenes in the 2006 martial-arts epic Fearless that require Jet Li to play an asshole. These are some pretty funny scenes. Assholism isn't, generally speaking, his thing—pained nobility is his thing. He is a legitimately world-renown ass-kicker, of course: Before he made a single mo...
Edward Snowden, Before The Storm: <em>Citizenfour</em>, Reviewed
Movies are lots of things, but "important" isn't one of them. It's not that they can't be meaningful and life-changing, but when a critic's praise tries to go beyond that, it raises red flags for me....
Here Are 12 Scary-Ass Halloween Movies To Totally Ruin Your Shit
I have always suspected that there is a reason why all of our best holidays come in the fall and winter. Days get shorter, and it's cold and wet out, and all the animals go to bed, and all the trees, like, die or whatever. Winter is a hard, shitty time of year....
<em>Red Dawn</em> Is Delusional Right-Wing Porn In The Best Possible Way
The best scenes in the original 1978 Dawn of the Dead aren't the early bursts of urban confusion or the biker-zombie rumbles. They're the scenes where the four isolated survivors giddily run through an abandoned shopping mall, balling out with the artifacts of a just-dead culture. They use mannequ...
There's Nothing More Loathsome Than Making A Film
From the funtastic new book, The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, check out this short essay Westlake wrote about working with Stephen Frears....
The Professional: Donald E. Westlake
Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008) was one of our most prolific and entertaining writers. Now, we've got this posthumous treat: The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, published by the University of Chicago Press and edited by Levi Stahl. The book is a ton of fun. I recently had the ch...
Why Paul Newman Just Got Better With Age
This week's curation at the Beast is Peter Richmond's fine 1995 GQ profile of Paul Newman:...
Words, Movies And Out Of Africa
From By the Book, the weekly Q&A series at the Times Book Review, dig this from Jodi Picoult:...
Here's What I Learned Watching FIFA's Incredible Propaganda Movie
Recently, soccer fans all over the world were impressed to learn that United Passions, a FIFA-financed movie about how wonderful FIFA is starring Gérard Depardieu, Sam Neill, and Tim Roth, had pulled in $200,000 at the box office since it premiered at Cannes in May. This sum may be a bit less than t...
<em>Blue Ruin</em> Is A Great Revenge Thriller About How Dumb Revenge Is
Every revenge movie eventually has to address the idea that, hey, maybe revenge is a really bad idea, that maybe you shouldn't organize your entire life around killing the person who wronged you. Usually, this notion is rejected immediately: A supporting character will say something like, "Wait, you...
<em>The Man From Nowhere</em> Is The Fucked-Up South Korean Blockbuster For You
The villains of the 2010 South Korean movie The Man From Nowhere are bad, bad people. How bad? They kidnap unwanted kids for use as drug-lab slave labor. When one passes out in the smack sweatshop, a heavy rolls his eyes and says, "Kids are so dramatic." Then he barks at the rest of 'em to get back ...
<em>Face/Off</em> Is Even Weirder And Radder Than You Remember
The great Hong Kong action director John Woo got to make a handful of English-language movies during his '90s Hollywood period. But he only ever got to make one true John Woo Movie here. That'd be 1997's Face/Off, an absolute nutball mega-budget pileup of all his favorite images (guys flying thr...
You Need More Bruce Lee In Your Life; Start With <em>The Chinese Connection</em>
The most iconic moment in 1972's Bruce Lee vehicle The Chinese Connection, and maybe of his entire career, comes when he walks into a Japanese dojo with a sign that the Japanese, as an insult, left at his teacher's funeral. He says he'll take on anyone in the dojo, and when one guy steps up, Lee s...
Watch This Bonkers <em>Universal Soldier</em> Sequel, But Skip The First Scene
Universal Soldier, you may remember, was a blast of pure 1992 cheese in which Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren play reanimated Vietnam super-soldiers who fight each other. It was pretty good! It was, in fact, the only pretty good movie ever made by German director Roland Emmerich, and its su...
Once Upon A Time In American Film
I had a subscription to American Film magazine from say 1982-86 and was happy to see this over at the great Cinephilia and Beyond. ...
The Gonzo <em>District B13</em> Proves That Parkour Was Good For Something
Right now, someone, somewhere, is trying to turn Ice Bucket Challenge: The Movie into a thing. That's how it works: These little movements bubble up from nowhere, briefly seize the collective imagination, and then disappear in a ball of smoke before some asshole figures out a way to monetize the t...
Toronto Film Festival 2014: 10 Movies We Can't Wait To See
The Toronto Film Festival, which starts Thursday, is always excellent one-stop shopping for many of the major films hoping to crash the Oscar and best-of-the-year conversations. Beyond the world premieres, it also features the best of what played at Cannes, as well as plenty of films that alread...