The third Jack Ryan thriller following The Hunt for Red October (1990) and Patriot Games (1992), Clear and Nowadays Danger (1994) is a bit more ambitious than its nearest predecessor but finally slightly worse thanks to some seriously muddled storytelling, ham-fisted moralizing, unrestrained caricatures of drug lords and especially corrupt government officials, and a badly [...]
Noël Carroll described Terrence Malick as a filmmaker who portrays the "primacy of sophistication." Malick attempts to capture images and sounds and words that are largely unfiltered by our usual perceptual processes. His films emphasize the act of looking for its own sake; they bypass language and other intermediary channels to plug the [...]
“This is mainly a comedy/thriller
about a young New Yorker’s dream to make a gangster movie and of his love
for a young girl, and his relationship with his friends.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
This is mainly a comedy/thriller about a young New Yorker’s dream
to make a gangster movie and of his love for a young girl, and his [...]
The Movie
The word is “schadenfreude” and Dictionary.com succinctly defines it as “pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.” Frankly I’m stunned that we English-speaking folks haven’t come up with our own word for it yet, since nobody on the planet loves to mock the unfortunate the way Americans do. (And save me your nasty emails, [...]
Forget the title. Adapted by Terrence McNally from his own movement, this is the stinging tale of eight gay friends and their trysts and tangles on the other side of three holiday weekends. Technically, rookie director Mantello is desperate to play straight. And, at times, the savoured tastefulness of the setting (a New York country [...]
The flood of slap films based on popular time-honoured TV shows should endure unabated with “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Just as corny as the long-running series, pic version has been cleverly cast and shrewdly skewed to request jointly to primary fans of the show and younger viewers only dreamily no stranger to with it. Result should [...]
Simon Templar, a.k.a. The Saint, is probably one of longest running serial characters in olden days. The character dates deceitfully to the 1920s, and has appeared in almost every written colour imaginable; from novels to comic books, all from the mind of author Leslie Charteris. Plainly, the leap to film [...]
Sporting the charisma of a lobotomised newt, hunky US Defense Findings agent Van Damme goes AWOL and turns up in Hong Kong, where he bumps into mountain man Gibb who, like Van Damme, is there to settle part in a secret international martial arts competition. They become advantageous buddies. This gives Van Damme extra reason [...]
“Children of the Living Dead” (COTLD) opens up feeling like the events are happening the morning after “Night of the Living Dead” (NOTLD). The location is the same, just outside a farmhouse near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Within a few minutes, it becomes clear that the frequently stretch of COTLD is more modern than that [...]
It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to you today.
Our time chronicling the life of Denver and Colorado, the nation and the world, is over. Thousands of men and women have worked at this newspaper since William Byers produced its first edition on the banks of Cherry Creek on April 23, 1859. We [...]