(Originally posted on 3/4/06) Ridley Scott’s career has, with a few notable exceptions (Alien, Blade Runner), been a case of style over substance. Scott, who came to prominence directing flashy commercials for the likes of Apple computer and Channel, is one of the cinema’s foremost visual artists, but he’s usually at a loss when it…

(Originally posted on 2/27/04) I don’t really get Albert Brooks. The guy is mildly witty in a West Coast Woody Allen-ish kinda way, but his apoplectic fits of neurotic exasperation leave me indifferent. With that out of the way, I must confess to being pleasantly surprised by Lost in America, Brooks’ fantasy about turning off,…

(Originally posted on 2/27/04) In 1959, while Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless was heralding the arrival of the French New Wave, John Cassavetes’ equally groundbreaking Shadows was igniting the independent American film movement that’s now blossomed into Sundance, Miramax, and all those small quirky films starring Patricia Clarkson. Yet despite its daring innovation in both subject matter…

(Originally posted on 2/26/04) Although I was disappointed to find that my favorite scene from 1982’s Poltergeist — the one with the paranormal expert tearing his face off in front of the bathroom mirror — employs a lame fake head for the gruesome effect, the film otherwise holds up incredibly well twenty years after it…

(Originally posted on 2/25/04) Sam Fuller’s films are raw, gritty, emotionally turbulent, and vicious, and his 1950 noir potboiler Pickup on South Street is 80 minutes of breathless genre fun infused with pure, uninhibited passion. Fuller’s tight close-ups capture the sweaty, wild-eyed emotions of his characters, and his energetic camera’s quick, jarring zooms and pull-backs…

(Originally posted on 2/25/04) Holy anti-Americanism, Japan! After the violent delirium of Battle Royale, director Kinji Fukasaku — along with his son Kenta, who finished the film after his father passed away in 2003 — returns with the despicable Battle Royale II. It’s three years after the first film’s schoolchildren were forced to hunt each…

(Originally posted on 2/24/04) A metaphor for adolescent angst? A satiric look at 21st century Japanese society? Or merely a twisted, trashy black comedy about kids forced to murder each other? Either way, Kinji Fukasaku’s hilariously energetic Battle Royale — a jazzed-up hybrid of Lord of the Flies, The Running Man, and “Survivor” based on…

(Originally posted on 2/28/04) As the Austrian countryside zooms by in an indistinct flash outside their train window, two strangers (scruffy American Ethan Hawke and dainty Frenchwoman Julie Delpy) strike up an intimate conversation in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. As in 2001’s Waking Life, Linklater’s preoccupation is the magic of conversation — a notion verbalized…

(Originally posted on 2/12/04) A young boy, no older than five, his face scrunched up in an expression of exhausted, hopeless misery, pushes a carousel in a circle along with a handful of similarly despondent kids. His repetitive, circular path offers no chance for escape, much as the Mexico he inhabits, teeming with abusive or…

(Originally posted on 2/10/04) Now here’s some suburban paranoia about rural America for you. In the wretched Wrong Turn, homicidal mutant cannibals in the West Virginian backwoods hunt pouty Eliza Dushku and her group of Abercrombie & Fitch buddies, with the unavoidable implication being that rural America is nothing but a breeding ground for monsters…