(Originally posted on 1/8/04) See Denzel steal. See Denzel get framed. See Denzel run around Florida like the hero of a second-rate Hitchcock thriller. Carl Franklin’s Out of Time is so depressingly average, so unworthy of genuine praise or vitriolic scorn, that there’s very little one can say about it. Denzel Washington plays a police…

(Originally posted on 1/6/04) One my trip to London for New Year’s, British Airways offered a variety of movies for my viewing pleasure. Since I figured I’d try to get some sleep, I chose Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any sleep, and thus I have only myself to blame for suffering…

(Originally posted on 12/19/03) “What can we do?” asks an aged grandfather in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1986 critical hit Dust in the Wind, a meditative film about one teenage Taiwanese couple’s journey from their rural hometown to the city. The old man’s question, spoken solemnly while sitting alone on the steps of his house, articulates the…

(Originally posted on 12/12/03) The Time to Live and the Time to Die is the first film I’ve seen by renowned Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and it strikes me as a near-masterpiece. A challenging, immensely moving semi-autobiographical portrait of two decades in the life of a Chinese family displaced from mainland China to Taiwan in…

(Originally posted on 12/12/03) Clint Eastwood’s underappreciated Bronco Billy is an affectionate ode to the fading myth of the American West and the enduring power of the American Dream. Eastwood, in one of his first roles to examine his own Western icon status, plays the titular cowpoke, a former New Jersey shoe salesman-turned-sharpshooter. Billy is…

(Originally posted on 12/11/03) Gus Van Sant’s hypnotic Gerry is like the love child between Samuel Beckett, Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tar (who Van Sant admits was a huge influence on the film), and Van Sant himself circa 1985. Similar to the Polish Brothers’ inferior Northfork, Gerry is absolutely transfixing at one moment and unbearably boring…

(Originally posted on 12/9/03) David Cronenberg’s pleasurably twisted The Brood (1979) may be the most damning movie ever made about psychiatry. Wacko therapist Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) is the preeminent practitioner of psychoplasmics, a revolutionary form of treatment in which the good doctor goofily role-plays with his unbalanced patients by earnestly pretending to be…

(Originally posted on 12/2/03) As readers of this site will undoubtedly come to learn, I have an abiding fascination/obsession with horror films, good or bad. Case in point: this weekend’s Saturday night rental, Prison, a 1988 junk-a-thon directed by Renny Harlin (pre-Die Hard II, post-Nightmare on Elm St. IV: The Dream Master). Starring Viggo Mortensen…

(Originally posted on 11/30/03) Earlier this year, I stated (in the pages of Stumped? magazine) that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers paled slightly in comparison to The Fellowship of the Ring. However, after watching New Line’s four-disc extended version of the trilogy’s second installment, I now enthusiastically revise my opinion.…

(Originally posted on 11/17/03) Sergio Leone was a master of genre revisionism, and yet it's funny to find that few people characterize his final film, Once Upon a Time in America, as an example of such. A hallucinatory, melancholic meditation on grief, ambition, and betrayal, Leone's film purports to be a gangster film but, in…