I'm another one of those who were fans of the film as kids. Must've watched it a million times. And I still remember a lot of it very clearly, to large extent because of those deaths you so well describe. I recall the sequence in the swamp being incredibly tense as well.

I think calling this article "clickbait" or "trolling" does a disservice to the genuine attempt at reevaluating the prequels. Many commentators here have honored that seriousness with arguments that go beyond quips and easy cracks, and while not everyone has to respond with such arguments, the article should elicit…

Oh well. I'll still watch it. The milieu is very interesting to me.

- He seemed to be troubled right at the end of the first episode, during that phone call to Claire! Incidentally, having lived in Pittsburgh for six years (and loved it), it was my experience that people were very friendly and that they would start talking to you at bus stops or even in the bus itself.

I hope this show gets to a point when it will let the conflicts play out during the actual rehearsing and performance of a show. Having seen only the first episode, my thought was that it needed more dancing. The direction did not seem to me to do justice to the few dancing sequences (tellingly, the strip-dancing was…

Actually, Fincher was in contention for the gig of directing Batman Begins, but apparently turned it down. Other potential directors for the first Batman film of the 21st century were Darren Aronofsky, M. Night Shyamalan, and even The Wachowskis. All of these would've made very different films from the one we got!

Eyes Wide Shut directed by Peter Strickland, but he has to stick largely to the Frederic Raphael/Stanley Kubrick screenplay, rather than go back to Schnitzler's source novel.

Your example brings up interesting questions. Here's what I propose: first, and most superficially, I'm not sure the question implies that the films remade have to be "favorites." As has been pointed out, plenty of remakes are absolutely unnecessary and result in terrible movies, but a case can be made for finding…

Something else that works about the scene is that, after Scott and his editor Pietro Scalia cut away from the close-up of Maximus turning and taking off his mask to the two-shot of Commodus and Quintus reacting with great surprise to seeing Maximus again, the camera starts yet another slow forward movement that…

David Mamet said the following in his book Bambi vs. Godzilla: "Burn the first reel. Almost any film can can be improved by throwing out the first ten minutes. That exposition that assuaged the script reader, the coverage writer, the studio exec, the star and her handlers puts the audience to sleep sleep sleep.Get…

The plot of this also reminds me a bit of the Paul Schrader-directed, Harold Pinter-scripted adaptation of Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers, as well as Polanski's Bitter Moon. In both cases, a couple spy on and influence a younger one in destructive ways during a trip (although I don't know how perverse By…

Does that statement mean that it appears Jolie's appropriation of Antonioni consists largely of people standing on cliffs and looking out to sea? Because if instead it means that Antonioni's filmmaking was largely about having people standing on cliffs, then I would say that's an exaggeration. There's way, way more to…

David Mamet's Heist, by contrast, is indeed enjoyably pulpy.

If Lucasfilm brought in Kasdan to start a new Star Wars series, is there a chance they might also bring him back for Indiana Jones 5 after his contribution to Raiders ? The way they are telling the story, it seems that the idea of hiring him came from Bad Robot. But if this is the smash everyone expects I don't…

I couldn't read this review without bringing up Scott Tobias's New Cult Canon entry on Code Unknown:

And what's weird as well is that even though they seem to have no faith in their institutions, they inevitably go back to them by the end. It seems to me that going rogue is sometimes understood as a matter of necessity borne not out of a corrupt organization, but a misguided one. There is a sense in these movies that…

Speaking of Bond's psychology, there is a telling moment in Skyfall when he is going through the tests after resurfacing, and he's playing this game of free association: a man says a word and Bond is supposed to answer with the first thing that comes to his mind. When the tester says "country," Bond responds…

Skyfall was politically confused and confusing, but because Bond's stories tend to boil down to going after the bad guy(s) and killing them, I think the politics didn't entirely get in the way of the action. I wonder if the same is the case with Spectre.

Just caught up with this last week and I enjoyed it, but I was expecting a more audaciously experimental approach to the use of the black-and-white imagery, or at least a stricter adherence to the idea of darkness. Only the McGuire segment clearly tries to use animation to explore the interactions between light and…

This is fascinating, thank you. I will certainly watch it again. I indeed am rather ignorant of the period and many of the allusions in the film, so I'll need to revise my statement about the film's take on the past after I've re'watched it and read more on some of the themes you bring up.