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A fictionalization of a real-life 1972 bank robbery and hostage situation in Brooklyn that goes awry almost from the moment it begins. Masterful direction from Sidney Lumet and stellar acting performances from a young Al Pacino from back in the days before he became a ham and an ice-cold John Cazale, as well as a talented supporting cast of colorful characters, ensured this film's place in movie history. Not a picture with a big message, no deep meaning, not a lot of emotional punch, just a goddamn great yarn, incredibly well made. One of my favorites.
Classic sci-fi/horror about a sentient computer imprisoning a woman in her home with the goal of using her body to become human. Explores existential themes of human existence and personal autonomy in the best classic literary science fiction tradition.
It's hard for me to judge this movie objectively. I first saw this as a kid, and loved it then, and although now the visual style seems slightly cheezy and low-budget to me, and the pacing definitely isn't the punchy pacing modern viewers are used to, the better points of the storytelling and themes hold up for me as an adult. I see this as perhaps the last of the great tradition of small, personal, humanist, character-driven sci-fi and horror movies that started perhaps in the 1950s, which began to be supplanted by a new, more grandiose, almost mythic or archetype-driven storytelling style in 1968 with "2001: A Space Odyssey" and…
What to say about this critical fave? A drug-addicted schizophrenic anarchist hacker takes on the forces of corporatism and global-scale evil in this dark cyberthriller series that never lets the intensity go below 10 for a second. Every scene is intense. Every piece of dialog. People look at each other intensely, or argue and threaten each other intensely. One woman was cast, I'm sure, primarily for her skill at sitting there looking, because it's almost all she does. The show never takes a quiet moment to gather power for the next scene, never lets up. It's just one intense climax to the next, like a Whitney Houston song.
This series reminds me of what took me so long to cotton to "Breaking Bad" for—slow pacing, intensity conveyed with lots of quiet and stillness instead of action. Which, in principle is admirable, and much harder to do well than the…
Imagine a movie described as "National Lampoon's Van Wilder, a frat-house comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Tara Reid". Now picture that same movie, except more crass than you're imagining.
Gritty, pretty watchable cop show. The acting is good. The first seasons are better and then it never gets bad, but isn't quite as good for the last few. Still fairly watchable though.
Terribly paced, cheaply made splatstick about a bunch of American tourists in Australia who encounter a menacing pack of digitally-generated koalas with glowing eyes and an actor in a very fake-looking "mutant koala" costume.
Cheapo horror flick about a bunch of people holed up in a house during a zombie outbreak. Mostly you don't even see the zombies. So, basically, "Night Of The Living Dead", except, totally uninteresting.
What a weird movie. Bottom-of-the-barrel crapola, with the (lack of) acting and production values of a cheap porn film, and yet... something about it... if this had been a big budget it would have been kinda good. It's about a zombie outbreak in Philadelphia, and a group of survivors trapped in a basement. But it's a lot more about dialogue than zombies eating people. And it has a couple of fanciful animated sequences that totally work as comic relief and look better than anything else in the movie. It's kind of like... this would have been a good movie if they'd spent the kind of budget on actors and production staff that they did on the animation. The writing is, strangely, not really that bad, if you can imagine a skilled director directing skilled actors at it. But the movie looks and feels like a porno but with zombies instead…
A stereotypical atheist-as-imagined-by-Christians wants to kill himself for 90 minutes that feels like 3 hours, while everybody preaches at him that they believe there's an alternative. The corny music and wooden sub-soap-opera-quality attempts at acting are such a solid tipoff that it's a Christian film that by the time you spot the surreptitious crucifixes and churches in the background of way too many shots, all of 5 minutes into it, it's absolutely no surprise.
The classic that originated tropes that have permeated popular culture ever since, and which has been remade or ripped off countless times—and all for good reason.
You already know the story: an alien invasion of "pod people" creates duplicates of human beings and replaces them. But if you haven't seen the 1956 original, what you may not know is how great a movie it is. This extremely dated-looking 1950s film is utterly effective and highly original even today, and still holds up astoundingly well as one of the best sci-fi/horror movies out there. Today's audiences, accustomed to big-budget Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters, may not be used to the more human-level drama and real storytelling here, but to me it will always be an impeccable, incredible classic and gripping view from start to finish.
My favorite Hitchcock movie. The birds in a small coastal California town begin inexplicably attacking the human populace, and it begins to look like a losing battle. Only Alfred Hitchcock could take such a thin premise and turn it into a suspense-filled horror masterpiece and major film classic.
Decent slightly-better-than-TV-movie-quality dramatization of a 1970 true story about the efforts to teach a girl who'd been imprisoned without human contact until the age of 14 to learn to speak and socialize.
One of the most difficult honorable mentions I've ever given. This is an unflichingingly violent and in substantial ways misogynistic drama dressed up as a lurid horror film.
A young boy is taken in and imprisoned for many years in the rural home of a serial killer who abducts him and his mother. The violence of several killings and the boy's imprisonment and enslavement by the killer are prominently and unflinchingly shown, but the real story is the development of their relationship and conflicts.
Despite being directed by Jennifer Lynch, critics have called it misogynist and I think they're right. The women in this film are two-dimensional and serve mostly as props to move the story of the mens' relationship along before they meet a grisly end. (Note that Lynch also directed "Boxing Helena" which people had similar complaints of misogyny about.)
Decent enough action/horror B-movie in which a small-town sheriff is caught between a military takeover and a plague of homicidal locals after a plane carrying a bioweapon goes down and infects everybody with a virus that turns them into psychopaths.
Remake of a 1973 George Romero flick. I'd really like to see the original. I can't imagine his was this much of an action flick. But this one is decently watchable, if you're in the mood for this kind of thing. Stars Timothy Olyphant.
Four youtube documentarians set out to make an amatueur rip off of "The Blair Witch Project" and fail at even that. This movie contains all the most boring "first-person shooter" found footage horror cliches, and nothing else.
Surprisingly unengaging 1970 Jack Nicholson drama about a rough-hewn, misogynistic classical-pianist-turned-oilfield-worker returning home to his family. Not much of a plot. It seems to be considered a classic but I don't know why you hear about it so often. Maybe this is one of those movies that people who like French New Wave cinema or the like.
If this isn't a cult favorite, it really should be. Pitch-black, occasionally very gory, but surprisingly fun indie flick about a down-on-their-luck punk rock band who hire a genial homeless guy to roadie for their tour so they can use his van after theirs is repossesed, but he turns out to be a flesh-eating demon.
There's absolutely no reason this movie should be as fun as it is, and yet, somehow, it is. Kind of a low-key standout for me, along the lines of other obscure indie faves like "Otis" and "The Signal" (2007) (which, BTW, the actor who plays the homeless guy/demon was in the art department for, so that's a fun connection.)
Stephen King adaptation directed by George Romero. Typical dull Stephen King adaption, only less happens. George Romero really should have hung it up after "Dawn Of The Dead", too.
Slightly uneven but admirably well-done tribute to 1970s cinematic gore á la "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Someone knew where they were doing here and really wanted to make a quality genre picture, not just an exploitative, derivative rip-off "tribute".
In 1979 a porn production crew rents a remote farm to make make a porn that would also be a "real movie" (clearly a fourth-wall nod there; this production tries, and to a respectable extent succeeds, to rise above its genre.) Unfortunately, the old couple they rent from are at first odd and menacing and then it gets worse.
The story and motivations don't quite hold up—the reason the old couple act the murderous way they do is never even hinted at, a classic case of "because, movie"—but, like a lot of '70s horror, this goes further into character and decent moviemaking than modern audiences are probably used to. It explores…
Matthew McUumellmahaye stars as a Florida fishing charter captain in a neo-noir crime thriller with a sci-fi twist that plays like a modern episode of The Twilight Zone. A little corny, definitely not great, but not bad, the acting kind of saves it.
Let me save you the trouble: The Shining was Kubrick trying to send a coded message full of symbols to tell us that the MK Ultra project was being used to mind control American citizens by creating the Laurel Canyon 1960's rock scene after Jim Morrison was hired to play a rock star because his dad sprayed aerosolized LSD that had something to do with Charles Manson, and Hitler, and Sirhan Sirhan, and the Freemasons, which John Lennon secretly said in an interview that he didn't want to be in anymore shortly before being killed by a guy who liked the book Catcher In The Rye, which is a mind control device by a military intelligence officer, and, uh, I literally cannot make up bullshit that is as ludicrous as this conspiracy theory "documentary". Does contain the memorable line, "I do believe Bob Marley may have been what he appeared…
Super-campy, painfully 80s cult "horror" movie, apparently for kids, about a boy who discovers the popular desert everyone is becoming addicted to is alive and taking over. Honestly kind of amusing for what it is. I wouldn't go so far as to say I liked it, but considering my revulsion for campy, bad horror, it's pretty good. I mean, standing next to crap like "Evil Dead" and all that absolute garbage from that time that so many people like for some reason, it's practically a masterpiece.
An apparent home movie where two girls who clearly aren't actresses walk into an empty house and begin writhing and emoting. I lasted about 15 minutes.
Here's something that's never happened before: a movie so disappointing it made me angry.
A man goes to spend the night in the woods after catching a hazy apparition on film the had been reported as walking along the edge of the trees near the road every night at sunset.
Basically, it's "The Blair Witch Project", except it's one guy instead of a group, and he sits at a campfire for a few hours instead of wandering for three days, and nothing happens.
Started off decent because the guy is actually kind of convincing. But, I mean, nothing happens. He makes camp, finds a bone, hears some noises, sits getting nervous, calls his wife to pick him up and leaves. And that's the plot. That's 90 minutes of movie.
Cheapo flick about a man who acts like a bad actor who inherits a farm on an island in Washington populated by other people who act like bad actors (except one, see below), only to discover tunnels on the property with zombified creatures dwelling in them. An entirely amateur effort that manages to distinguish itself by being just a scintalla more clever than the usual bottom-of-the-barrel amateur horror movie fare, plus some oddly somewhat-adequate cinematography and orchestral score, both also just a scintilla better than these kind of awful movies usual are, plus one mid-movie soliloquy from a crusty old guy who, strikingly, can actually act, recounting the genesis of the monsters with all the gravity of Brando in Apocalypse Now.
It was funny, in the first seconds of the movie, the strings kick in on the score, and I was like, "That's kind of good background music for a…
Decent documentary on Roger Ebert and "At The Movies", by a friend of his. I've always liked Ebert as a critic, this sheds some light on him as a person. Has interviews with his family members, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, plus you get to see an outtake where Gene Siskel calls him an asshole, which, you always knew must've happened behind the scenes, but never thought you'd see it.
Godawful home-movie-quality "mockumentary" about a bunch of cringily inane college students in 2007 who decide to make a YouTube video, as if that's some sort of event, with not a single laugh to be had anywhere in it.
This appears to be the work of some sort of improv comedy troupe whose primary distinguishing attribute is that one of them owned a movie camera, and thought that entertaining themselves would be entertaining to an audience.
Weirdly, some of the voice work in this apparent home movie is from cast members of Parks & Rec and Reno 911, and it's executive produced by one of the producers behind Portlandia. Why would successful TV comedy people do this to themselves? Was there blackmail involved?
This odd little sci-fi/not-very-funny black comedy has a certain appeal until it eventually collapses under its own weight. In the near future when all drugs have been made legal, a douchey biochemist tests his latest concotions on his douchey friends. The movie is mostly scenes of people getting fucked up or being hung over in imaginative and increasingly gross ways, yet manages somehow to be slightly entertaining and not anywhere near as bad as that sounds... not surprising, because it's Canadian, and seems to have that typical Canadian entertainment "slightly better than it should have been" thing.
Unfortunately, though, by the end, it sort of gives up the ghost, disappearing into an inscrutable and unsatisfying montage of psychedelic visuals instead of tying up the story. It's too bad.
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