Thriller Archives - Page 20 of 67

Fantastic Fest ’14: Closer to God

September 21, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/****
written and directed by Billy Senese

by Walter Chaw What Billy Senese's small, reasonably smart, moderately ambitious Closer to God really has going for it is that it doesn't make many mistakes along the way to becoming a pleasantly-tame Larry Cohen knock-off. The problem is that it muddies its own waters by engaging in the human-cloning debate, only to fall back on the hoary "clones are monsters" trope and concur that science is bad. Its constantly-mentioned Frankenstein's monster allegory is defeated, too, when our good Dr. Victor(-not-Frankenstein) (Jeremy Childs) turns out to have a couple of adorable moppets of his own, thus negating, generally, the read of the Shelley source material that masculine procreation is spawned by "natural" childlessness. What's faithful is the uncompromising nature of the picture's solution; a pity that its hopelessness is more a product of its missed opportunities than of any pathos generated by its execution.

Godzilla (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

September 16, 20142014, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image C+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston
screenplay by Max Borenstein
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla, the 32^nd Godzilla film just including the Toho series and the three previous American contributions, manages somehow to walk the line between nostalgia for the guy-in-a-suit heroism of the earlier installments and the demands and expectations of the modern CGI wonderland. It has Japanese actor Ken Watanabe be the mournful, grave centre of the piece, allowed at one point to utter “Gojira” (later, on a radar, we see it spelled out in obeisance to the movie’s origins) and given the film’s most crowd-pleasing line, right before shit gets real in San Francisco. It cares deeply about the monster’s place in Japanese culture as a simultaneous reminder of what happened to the country during the war, its humiliation afterwards, and its ambiguous place in the world as Japan reconstructed its image. What confused me most when I watched the Toho flicks on Saturday afternoons on a 9″ b&w television was that Godzilla seemed heroic–every bit as nuanced, as conflicted, as ronin as a Mifune samurai; a hero who would return, like Arthur did for England, when the nation needed him. The Godzilla legend is a fable of reconstruction and self-sufficiency–a Leda and the Swan story, where power is drawn from the very source of victimization. He’s a complex national symbol, perhaps the definitive cross-cultural Japanese signifier, and the movies that get that (my favorite is Destroy All Monsters, with its dabbling in female hive minds) are brilliant bits of sociology and history. Edwards’s Godzilla gets it.

TIFF ’14: Waste Land

September 2, 20142014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Pieter Van Hees

by Bill Chambers Ominously chaptered after the weeks in a pregnancy, Waste Land begins with an encouraging but deceptive touch of absurdity, as Brussels homicide detective Leo Woeste (Jérémie Renier) placidly stands in for the victim at a nauseatingly fresh crime scene while the addled perpetrator tries to reconstruct the murder for a forensics team. Leo's next case, involving the occult-related death of a young Congolese immigrant, coincides with wife Kathleen (the appropriately-named Natali Broods) announcing she's with child–her second, Leo's first–and planning on aborting it due to her husband's grim attachment to his profession. He goads her into keeping it by pledging to quit the force once he's through with this latest investigation, but it proves an unreasonable vortex that soon has him becoming infatuated with the dead man's sister (Babetida Sadjo) and going off the grid, as well as the proverbial deep end.

Telluride ’14: Foxcatcher

September 1, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Telluride 2014, Thriller

***½/****
starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman
directed by Bennett Miller

by Walter Chaw Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher is timely because of its excoriation of the 1%–and timeless because of the care with which it handles relationships between men, and between men and their mothers. It has faith in its audience in a way that’s rare and always has been, leaving wide swaths of exposition buried in glances and gestures, making itself into something that’s very much like the amateur wrestling it ably recreates in the film. It’s a big movie composed of subtle movements; it’s reticent. It’s also grounded by unbelievable performances from Mark Ruffalo, an actor I really like who’s never been better; and Channing Tatum, who reduces himself to a pure distillation of his masculinity and will probably be underestimated as a result. An early moment with Ruffalo and Tatum–playing Olympic champion wrestlers and brothers Dave and Mark Schultz, respectively–as they train in a dingy little college gym, is grim and wordless, bloody and violent, and capped by Dave cuffing his little brother and asking for a hug as he drops him off. It’s brotherhood in its intimate complexity in just a few gestures.

Telluride ’14: The Imitation Game

August 31, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014, Thriller, UK, War

**½/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear
screenplay by Graham Moore
directed by Morten Tyldum

by Walter Chaw Benedict Cumberbatch is amazing, truly, in Morten Tyldum's better version of A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game. Based on the life of logician and mathematician Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park genius who broke the Enigma code but was later pilloried for his homosexuality, the film is conventional in every way save Cumberbatch, who, frankly, had never particularly appealed to me before now. His Turing is clearly (to a guy in the middle of all this sudden awareness of Autism) somewhere on the Autism spectrum, incapable of building relationships and understanding metaphors, making him the perfect person, in his (mis)understanding of the world, to break codes. All language and every subtlety of human interaction is a puzzle for him, you see; breaking the unbreakable German Enigma cipher is simply another of the same variety. The Imitation Game, however, is crystal clear, lockstep in narrative and exposition and careful to leave no child behind as it explains how Turing and his team of irregulars managed to build the first computer and defeat the Nazi war machine by intercepting its communications. At the end, its message is the same as The Incredibles', though housed in a far more conventional motor: different is good, and you shouldn't criminalize homosexuality, because what if a gay guy is the saviour of the free world and you just chemically-castrated him and caused him to kill himself? As messages go, that's not a tough one to get behind.

Transcendence (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 28, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

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**/**** Image B Sound A Extras D
starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jack Paglen
directed by Wally Pfister

by Angelo Muredda If his name wasn't already plastered over the ads for the nerd bona fides the studio hopes it will signal, you'd still know that Transcendence was the work of Wally Pfister from an inimitably-portentous opening shot featuring the long, steady fall of a raindrop: as meaningless a totem as Inception's ever-spinning (or is it wobbling?) top. Having lensed all but one of Christopher Nolan's joyless epics, including that "Twilight Zone" episode told with Miltonic gravitas, Pfister has at last graduated to making his own Nolan film about serious men making serious moral choices in the name of serious ideas–here, sending the first human consciousness up into the cloud to fuse with an artificially-intelligent program, the better to meddle in the affairs of mortals. The Pfister-Nolan collaboration was a fruitful one, the equivalent of a hammer repeatedly meeting its companion gong, but watching the alternately soapy and chilly Transcendence, one can't help but feel the cinematographer-turned-director would have been better served by a more conspicuous departure, a project that better indulged his more melodramatic instincts.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

July 9, 2014****/****, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Mark Bomback
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw Matt Reeves's remarkable Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (hereafter Dawn) isn't the best sequel since The Empire Strikes Back, but it is the best sequel since The Dark Knight. It's uncomplicated but beautifully executed–so pure and genuinely-felt that its conclusions about the unavoidable zero-sum game of tribalism land as not didactic but poetic. That certain sense of Tennyson bleeds into the overgrown post-apocalyptic landscape, all torpid acedia in its human ruins and in a tree-bound ape village that represents a sort of circular hopelessness. We recognize it as the beginning of a successor civilization that is unfortunately exactly like the beginnings of the civilization on which it's being built. Dawn's best trick is in balancing our sympathies in this way. We cast our lot with heroic Caesar (Andy Serkis, in a motion-capture performance that is one of the great silent-movie turns, ever), who's pushing against a Cheney-manqué in Koba (Toby Kebbell). Caesar gratifies our instinct for the underdog: it's easier to identify with Adam than with Nero. And then Reeves shifts to a human refuge and populates it with people, specifically Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and Ellie (Keri Russell), working on a peaceful solution against the more bellicose and paranoid of their number (Kirk Acevedo and Gary Oldman). No fair guessing which philosophy wins out–it's the only one that ever seems to.

Final Exam (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

July 3, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

*½**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring Cecile Bagdadi, Joel Rice, Ralph Brown, DeAnna Robbins
written and directed by Jimmy Huston

by Bryant Frazer Beware the toothless horror film–it’s no fun being gummed to death. That’s how you feel, more or less, by the climax of Final Exam, a low-budget Halloween knock-off crossed with a dopey frat-boy comedy. Written and directed by Jimmy Huston, who had made a series of southern-fried features for the drive-in circuit with North Carolina-based actor-producer Earl Owensby, Final Exam is a vintage programmer about a handful of students on a mostly-deserted college campus and a serial killer slicing his way through them, essentially at random.

Assassins/Cobra/The Specialist [Triple Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

June 30, 20141980s, 1990s, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Stallone, Thriller

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COBRA (1986)
*/**** Image C+ Sound C Extras D
starring Sylvester Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen, Reni Santoni, Andrew Robinson
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel Fair Game by Paula Gosling
directed by George P. Cosmatos

THE SPECIALIST (1994)
*/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, James Woods, Eric Roberts
screenplay by Alexandra Seros
directed by Luis Llosa

ASSASSINS (1995)
*½/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Julianne Moore, Anatoly Davydov
screenplay by Andy Wachowski & Larry Wachowski and Brian Helgeland
directed by Richard Donner

by Walter Chaw As easy as it is to dismiss Sylvester Stallone as your everyday, run-of-the-mill swinging dick, another in the pantheon of Eighties-into-Nineties box-office meatsticks assembled anew by Sly in his Expendables franchise, it becomes clear in retrospect that Stallone has his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist in his most personal projects, if not always in his contract jobs. Although an obvious and atrocious failure whose Stallone-authored screenplay, the end-product of a series of rewrites Stallone took it upon himself to inflict on Beverly Hills Cop, Cobra manages still to deliver a few smart genre mash-up moments, a few topical reflections of late-'80s crime-wave paranoia. Sandwiched in there right between his second and third Rambo films and fourth and fifth Rockys, Cobra is the kind of vanity piece that appears now and again in Stallone's repertoire to distract attention away from all the other stuff that only looks like a vanity project. Stallone is sneaky in a very particular way. As a sociologist, intentional or not, he is absolutely brilliant, and just on the strength of his Rocky and Rambo pictures, he's managed as good a diary of the fears and hopes of the last twenty years as any other body of work from any other single artist. He's the Bruce Springsteen of popular cinema. Bruce produced a lot of crap, too.

Sleepaway Camp (1983) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

June 25, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Teen, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Mike Kellin, Katherine Kamhi, Paul DeAngelo, Jonathan Tiersten
written and directed by Robert Hiltzik

by Bryant Frazer Ah, summer camp. Softball games, capture the flag, night-swimming, and life-changing boating accidents. Not to mention killer bees, child molesters, maniacs in the shower, and one kid with a whole lot of baggage, if you know what I mean. Sleepaway Camp is a slasher movie, and it depicts lakeside Camp Arawak as a pressure cooker of hormones and teenage flop sweat. Into this fetid milieu step Ricky and Angela, teenaged cousins united by tragedy: a boating accident that killed Angela’s parents and sibling some years earlier. Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) might be a little awkward, but he just wants to fit in; Angela (Felissa Rose), meanwhile, seems downright disturbed, spending much of her time dead silent, staring down her fellow campers with a mournful, almost accusatory glare. Before long, some of those campers start dropping dead as surely as the flies that coat the glue strips dangling in Arawak’s kitchen. There’s a soup incident, a shower incident, and an incident involving a toilet stall and angry bees. There’s a bit of business with a curling iron that’s probably inappropriate in a movie starring underage actors. The slasher’s hands appear on screen, but do they belong to unhappy Angela? Overprotective Ricky? Or someone else entirely?

True Blood: The Complete Sixth Season (2013) – Blu-ray with Digital Copy

June 15, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

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Image A- Sound A Extras B-
"Who Are You, Really?," "The Sun," "You're No Good," "At Last," "**** the Pain Away," "Don't You Feel Me," "In the Evening," "Dead Meat," "Life Matters," "Radioactive"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The penultimate season of "True Blood" was fraught with behind-the-scenes turmoil. Creator-showrunner Alan Ball had departed the series and his replacement, Ball's old "Cybill" cohort Mark Hudis, was himself replaced partway through the season by long-time "True Blood" scribe Brian Buckner. (Ball has a history of tapping out after five seasons and being notoriously difficult to replace–"Six Feet Under" ended when it did because he couldn't convince anyone to take over.) Whether this directly contributed to an abrupt plot development that effectively cleaves the season in two, the truth is that "True Blood" weathers these personnel changes invisibly enough as to affirm it is either on autopilot by now or, to be less generous, was already something of a runaway train that had only ornamental use for a conductor. Whatever the case, the show's sixth year represents a marginal rebound–though at this point in my "True Blood" journey, I'm just a masochist ranking the instruments of torture.

Non-Stop (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 12, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

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½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Anson Mount
screenplay by John W. Richardson & Chris Roach and Ryan Engle
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Furthering the all-signs-point-to-yes idea that the greatest threat to national security is an ill-informed white guy with a grudge of some kind, Jaume Collet-Serra’s execrable Non-Stop is the latest stop on the Liam Neeson winsome-badass tour. In this one, he plays alcoholic air marshal Bill Marks, grieving the death of his daughter and about to get one last chance to make right with the universe. At this point, it’s fair to ask if Neeson is exploiting the tragic loss of wife Natasha Richardson for added gravitas in shit like this or genuinely drawn to these roles from an insensate expression of pain. Whatever the case, as this is not much different in feel and quality from his soon-to-be-completed Taken trilogy, it might be time for him to find a different agent. Lucky for Bill, sharing the fateful flight essayed in the film is an adorable moppet he can pretend is a version of his daughter and save from death, as well as a middle-aged but exactly-attractive-enough woman, Jen (Julianne Moore), he can pretend is the mother of his dead kid and quasi fall in love with. It’s all so gratifyingly tidy.

The Double (2014) + Cold in July (2014)

May 29, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE DOUBLE
**½/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, James Fox
screenplay by Richard Ayoade & Avi Korine, based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky
directed by Richard Ayoade

COLD IN JULY
***/****
starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, Vinessa Shaw, Don Johnson
screenplay by Nick Damici & Jim Mickle, based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale
directed by Jim Mickle

by Walter Chaw Writer-director Richard Ayoade's follow-up to his well-received feature debut Submarine, this loose interpretation of Dostoevsky's The Double plays rather like Kafka adapted by David Lynch, or Terry Gilliam at his most restrained. It's good. It doesn't plough new ground, necessarily, but its dedication to a theme and a very fine performance by Jesse Eisenberg as a man and his titular doppelgänger carry it over its rougher patches. Visually engaging with its washed-out, diseased, Cronenbergian/Lars von Trier colour palette and packed with innovative, maybe self-conscious camera flourishes and affectations, it all plays out a bit insular, a little too obvious given the entire history of the double in this kind of movie, but at least it's executed with a persistence of vision. What catches me up short about Ayoade's films, though, is that ineffable quality of audition reel. They're entirely identifiable by the breadth of their references: Submarine for its obvious connection to Harold and Maude (and why do I keep hearing "The Only Living Boy in New York" when it unspools?), now The Double with its portfolio of referents. If it happens to be assembled smartly, more's the frustration. I can't tell whether the movie is good because Ayoade's a gifted filmmaker or simply a great scrap-booker. I guess it doesn't really matter.

Death Wish (1973) – Blu-ray Disc + Stone Cold (1991) – DVD

May 27, 20141970s, 1990s, 2014, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Revenge, Thriller

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DEATH WISH
***½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Charles Bronson, Vincent Gardenia, William Redfield, Hope Lange
screenplay by Wendell Mayes, based on the novel by Brian Garfield
directed by Michael Winner

STONE COLD
**/**** Image C+ Sound B-
starring Brian Bosworth, Lance Henriksen, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray
screenplay by Walter Doniger
directed by Craig R. Baxley

by Jefferson Robbins The urban vigilante is one of cinema's most potent, enduring figures, and it's worth asking how he got there. Michael Winner's influential but derided Death Wish drafts an explicit genealogy for its cosmopolitan avenger, granting him claim to the mantle of the lone lawman of the Old West. Bereaved through violence, Manhattan architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) takes an assignment revising a valuable development plan near Tucson. There he pauses to watch a cowboy shootout re-enacted for tourists, the bad guys toppling until the besieged sheriff is the sole, righteous survivor. It's a cheap, thrilling, thoroughly Hollywood portrayal of frontier justice, and it represents an ethos Paul's host Jainchill (Stuart Margolin) urges him to carry in his heart back to New York, where unlicensed firearm possession has been illegal since 1911. This tension isn't original to Wendell Mayes's relatively terse screenplay–it originates in Brian Garfield's 1972 source novel, published after the author spent a decade cranking out pulp western yarns. But Death Wish uses this element to make its own statement, grafting the mediated concept of frontier self-justification onto an urban morality play. The western may be dead, and it may have been a lie to begin with (and it may be the cinema of the '70s that killed it), but Death Wish is among the genre's inheritors. Don't all children eventually hope to supersede their parents?

Beneath (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

May 26, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

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**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Daniel Zovatto, Bonnie Dennison, Chris Conroy, Jonny Orsini, Mark Margolis
screenplay by Tony Daniel & Brian D. Smith
directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw Between producing films for promising newcomers (Ti West and Jim Mickle among them), acting in movies like You're Next, and of course directing his own quartet of exceptional, loaded fright flicks (Habit, No Telling, Wendigo, The Last Winter), Larry Fessenden, quietly, surely, has become perhaps the most important independent voice in horror. He seems interested in the sociology of the genre, in how it's very much the "indicator species" in the cinematic swamp–how it, more than any other genre, has the potential to pull back the curtain. It's not just the affection for genre–and deconstruction is never the end goal–but also the understanding and reworking of the basic tenets of genre that distinguishes Fessenden's work from disrespectful "post-modern" bullshit like Cabin in the Woods. It never feels as though he's slumming (as it did when Coppola and Branagh dabbled in horror); his subtext remains subtext, his perspective is always the victim's rather than the bully's. His own take on the Spam-in-a-cabin/monster-in-the-lake concept, Beneath, showcases that intelligence, even as its energy–particularly when held against his last four films–flags through most of a soft introduction. But what it loses there it makes up for in spades in a piece that ultimately feels a great deal in mood and tone like Stephen King's short story "The Raft." For a child of the Eighties who devoured King's Skeleton Crew upon publication, there can be no higher praise.

Darkman (1990) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

April 22, 20141990s, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Sam Raimi, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

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***½/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras A
starring Liam Neeson, Frances McDormand, Colin Friels, Larry Drake
screenplay by Chuck Pfarrer and Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi and Dan Goldin & Joshua Goldin
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II is among the best American films of the 1980s. It’s audacious and ingenious, the kind of movie people describe as having been made by the seat of one’s pants–the kind of movie that’s doomed to be underestimated because its genre is disreputable and its sensibilities are too cartoonish. Indeed, the energy in Raimi’s early, best work is akin to Tex Avery and Three Stooges, but he controls it, wields it; the anti-David O. Russell. Only in Crimewave does he overuse that muscle. In Evil Dead II, the humour is low, there is absolutely no shame, and in a real way, the picture encapsulates what was delirious and sloppy about ’80s blockbuster cinema. It’s a thing of beauty, exaggerated pathos, and Wagnerian derring-do. Raimi followed it in 1990 with what’s essentially a rebuttal to Tim Burton’s Batman, the “biggest movie of the moment” from the year before. Batman was the first salvo in a barrage of prestige “pulp” entertainments that presented the Comic Book as “A” material; Raimi drags it back into “B,” at least for a little while. His movies are EC and off-Code and Bernie Wrightson and Jack Davis and Al Williamson, while Burton’s are German Expressionism and sad, sometimes inscrutably solipsistic tales of Oyster Boys. Raimi, in 1990, made the best comic-book movie there ever was, a title only challenged by Raimi’s own Spider-Man 2: Darkman.

Transcendence (2014)

April 17, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jack Paglen
directed by Wally Pfister

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

April 3, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw A fine companion piece to last summer's The Lone Ranger, with another hero whose essential goodness has become anachronistic in a world defined by its ugliness and venality, the Russo Brothers' Captain America: The Winter Soldier (hereafter Cap 2), for all its boom-boom, is surprisingly thoughtful–and surprisingly doom-laden. It's dark as hell. Gone are the pulp machinations of Joe Johnston–this one is more The Empire Strikes Back than The Rocketeer, where the victories are Pyrrhic and the bad guys are smarter and better-equipped. By the end, this most optimistic of superheroes resolves himself to rescuing a friend, while his closest comrade-in-arms advises him to look for love again. They're small goals, the kind of goals that mere mortals happen to share with this demigod. As such, they provide the film with an unexpected payload of pathos and nostalgia for lost selves that used to believe the world would be better if only we had a friend upon which we could always depend, and love that would remain evergreen. Cap 2 is about our better natures, and it's about the realization as you grow older that you may have allowed your better nature to be subsumed by misdirected senses of duty. It's about what it means to compromise your values on the altar of "maturity" and "sophistication"–even "progress" and "modernity." And when it works best, it's about what it means when you don't.

Cat People (1982) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

April 2, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Horror, Romania, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Werewolf

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nastassia Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O’Toole
screenplay by Alan Ormsby, based on the story by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bryant Frazer Amid the American horror boom of the late-1970s and early-1980s, when everything old was new again and once-dormant studio properties like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, and The Fly were suddenly valuable franchises, the script for a remake of Cat People, one of the most subtle of all horror classics, somehow ended up on Paul Schrader’s desk. Why Schrader? Dumb luck, mostly. Certainly he had no great love for the source material, a 1942 horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur that Schrader famously (and charmlessly) claimed “isn’t that brilliant.” But he must have seen in the raw material the opportunity to make a deeply weird movie, one that fused a new mythology with a contemporary melodrama of fear, desire, and violence. The result is not just a personal expression of Schrader’s own sex-and-death preoccupations, but a sort of high-water mark for the quixotic attempt to meld visually sophisticated erotica with commercially savvy narrative storytelling.

Thief (1981) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

April 1, 20141980s, 2014, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky, Willie Nelson
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the novel The Home Invaders by Frank Hohimer
directed by Michael Mann

“Look, I have run out of time. I have lost it all. So l cannot work fast enough to catch up, and l cannot run fast enough to catch up. And the only thing that catches me up is doin’ my magic act. But it ends, you know? It will end. When l got this, right there, it ends, it is over. So I am just asking you…to be with me.”
-Frank (James Caan), Thief (1981)

“I’m catching up. On life. Meeting someone like you.”
-John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), Public Enemies (2008)

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Like the historical Dillinger, the fictional Frank was just a punk kid overzealously punished for a petty crime by a judge looking to make an example of him. Instead, he created the man Frank is as Thief begins: a master safecracker, taught his trade in the joint by fellow convict Okla (Willie Nelson, heartbreaking). As Frank recounts in a mesmerizing monologue that Caan, for what it’s worth, has counted as his finest piece of screen acting, the other thing he learned in Joliet is how to create a forcefield around himself by disengaging from fear. It’s not Zen detachment that he’s mastered; a man of flashy tastes, he’s too much the materialist to live like Heat‘s ascetic Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), whose Modernist house in the hills is all windows and no furniture. They are cut from the same cloth, though, in that they’re acutely aware of the temporariness of their stolen lifestyles and have no qualms about jumping ship to stay ahead of the enemy.