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Jason Bourne Is The Paranoid-Assassin Hero America Needed, And Deserved
I don’t know if I can call Matt Damon’s Bourne movies the best action franchise that’s come along thus far this century. After all, the original Fast and the Furious came out in 2001, a year before The Bourne Identity, and the idea of picking between Fast and Bourne is the kind of thing that makes m...
Danny Boyle Movies, Ranked
Danny Boyle is one of the most quietly adventurous filmmakers working today. He’ll do a science-fiction movie, then a period piece, then a Tarantino-type thriller, then a romantic comedy, then a conventional biopic, and he won’t so much as blink once. He is an auteur of the old-fashioned sort: His m...
Walter Matthau Was Addicted To Losing
A Siegel Film, Don Siegel’s account of his life as a film director is an entertaining and instructive guide to making movies. I especially like the section about Siegel’s experience working with Walter Matthau on Charley Varrick. ...
<i>The Bank Job</i> Is A Great Jason Statham Flick, Even Though He Hardly Kicks Anybody
The Bank Job is a movie that stars Jason Statham, but it’s not a Jason Statham movie. The chief attributes of his persona, as established in a long line of mostly-pretty-great action B-movies (like, say, this one or this one), are just not there. We don’t get the cold-eyed and square-jawed stare, or...
<i>The Walk</i> Is A Cloying, Uneven Caper With An Absolutely Amazing Final Act
The feat that made Philippe Petit legendary—his tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974—was both brave and insane. What made 2008’s Man on Wire, the Oscar-winning documentary about his achievement, so striking was that despite full access to Petit and his co...
The Gambling Drama <i>Mississippi Grind </i>Will Break Your Heart
When their eyes first meet, there’s an immediate spark, or perhaps a shared recognition. Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) sells houses, but he’s not particularly good at it, mostly because he doesn’t care at all about his job, and only gets excited about the next time he can gamble. Curtis (Ryan Reynolds) is ...
<i>Elite Squad: The Enemy Within</i> Is The Next Stop For <i>Narcos</i> Fiends
There’s a very good chance you’ve spent some time in the past few week binging on Narcos, the new Netflix show about the unlikely career of one Pablo Escobar. It’s a great show, one that goes as wide as possible in considering all the effects of the U.S.’s war on drugs and its appetite for them. May...
<i>Goodnight Mommy </i>Is Effortlessly Disturbing
Goodnight Mommy is uneven, and in this case that’s a good thing. The movie is a long stretch of quiet, bucolic landscapes and indoor-voice family squabbles, punctuated by a hard left turn into ultraviolence. The transition from psychological to physical horror is so abrupt, the shock of its mere exi...
Robert De Niro Redeems The Dopey Fantasy That Is <i>The Intern</i>
At a time when some romantic comedies are flexing an edgier, more smart-ass tone—They Came Together, Sleeping With Other People, even Trainwreck—perhaps it’s a refreshing palate-cleanser that Nancy Meyers movies continue to operate in their own storybook world. You know what to expect from the write...
<i>Everest </i>Works Best When It Focuses On The Mountain, Not The Feeble Men On It
1. If nothing else, you should see Everest on as big a screen as possible. I was fortunate enough to see it in 3-D on a digital IMAX screen—not the same as the IMAX format, mind you, there’s a difference, but still, you know, big—and I’m glad I did. The most you can hope for from a movie about Mount...
<i>First Blood </i>Is A Darker, Sadder, And Better Rambo Flick Than You Remember
The climax of 1982’s First Blood isn’t a gun battle or a knife fight. It’s Sylvester Stallone, as John Rambo, breaking down into big, blubbery tears, trying to make sense of the world around him. He’s learned that he’s the last surviving member of his elite fighting force, that America has no furthe...
<i>Black Mass </i>Plays Like A Boston-Mob-Thriller Parody
1. Whatever your thoughts on The Departed or The Town—the modern Boston mob/crime thrillers that all modern Boston mob/crime thrillers are measured against—it is undeniable that everyone involved was deeply invested in both. Matt Damon had been waiting his whole life to play a character like his Dep...
<i>Sicario</i> Is An Unrelenting Horror Story Disguised As A Drug-War Action Movie
Sicario is a movie that rumbles. I mean that literally: Through the first half of the film, there’s rarely a scene in which something isn’t growling or grumbling in the background. Sometimes the sound comes from something big, like a passing APC engine or a helicopter blade, and sometimes from somet...
<i>Shanghai Noon</i> Is The Goofy Kung-Fu Western You Didn't Know You Wanted
Rush Hour was a silly little action-comedy B-movie that blew the fuck up in 1998, and it was easy to get the sense, watching things play out, that Hollywood wasn’t quite sure how to deal with that level of unexpected success. The studios could make more Rush Hour movies, of course, which they absolu...
Toronto Film Festival 2015: 10 Movies We Can’t Wait To See
The 40th Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday, represents both what’s great and what’s maddening about the fall movie season. With the summer blockbusters behind us, we can focus more on serious, ambitious dramas—though some of those might turn out to be lame awards bait or pretentious mi...
<i>Kung Fu Hustle </i>Is Goofy, Referential, And Totally Insane
The whole point of the Jim Carrey movie The Mask is the idea of using CGI to combine a pretty standard and amiable zero-to-hero comedy with the antic, absurdist slapstick of Bugs Bunny cartoons. Stephen Chow’s 2004 movie Kung Fu Hustle came a decade after The Mask and from a different side of the wo...
Summer Movies 2015: <i>Mad Max</i> Rises, Adam Sandler Sinks
For all the talk about how summer movies are supposedly rotting everyone’s souls, this summer produced:...
Here Is The Trailer For That Will Smith Movie About The NFL And Concussions
Here’s the first trailer for Concussion, a very serious-looking movie about how Will Smith discovered CTE in the brains of football players and how the NFL tried to silence him with lots of mean stares....
<i>Kickboxer </i>Is Even Sillier Than You Remember, And Even Better, Too
I’m pretty sure the first animated gif I ever saw was Jean-Claude Van Damme dancing in a Thai bar in Kickboxer. The image is the sort of thing that sticks with you: his khakis hiked up to a near-Urkel level, his spaghetti-strap tank top just barely managing to exist, his face contorted into what I g...
<i>Fallen Angels </i>Has The Prettiest, Artiest, Most Nonsensical Gunfights Ever Filmed
When I was in high school, Hong Kong art-film superstar Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 classic Chunking Express was one of those weird movies that became a cornerstone of my whole idea that I was a Smart Person Who Appreciated Smart Things. I watched it over and over and over, and started telling people it was...