Action/Adventure Rated NR
“…a monster movie with equal parts mourning and mayhem.”
One of the landmark spaghetti Westerns from Italian director Sergio Leone, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly follows the crisscrossing paths of three killers in Civil War-era America. The scam artists and all-around scoundrels are played by Eli Wallach (the ugly), Lee Van Cleef (the bad) and Clint Eastwood (the good, but only by
The Great Escape portrays being a prisoner of war as something of a lark. I’ve seen country clubs dirtier than the POW camp in this picture. The movie seems to take its cue from Elmer Bernstein’s jaunty theme music, a tune that demands to be whistled while you work. As it details the based-on-fact, 250-man
To get you ready for this weekend’s Errol Flynn festival at the Music Box, here’s another review of one of the swashbuckler’s best…
Action/Adventure Rated R
The definitive 1980s action flick, Die Hard distilled the shoot-’em-up formula to its essence, trapping a cop – Bruce Willis as John McClane – in an office building while bad guys hold the employees hostage. The movie’s greatest asset is its purity – perfectly streamlined even at 132 minutes, there is nothing superfluous to distract
One of Bruce Lee’s signature kung-fu flicks, Enter the Dragon features the actor/martial-arts expert at the height of his performing powers. Small and sinewy, Lee left the impression he didn’t have a muscle he didn’t need – and that he probably could kill you with any one of them. Much of the movie’s opening is
British director John Boorman approached the Arthurian legends with reverence and awe and came away with the passionate and mystical Excalibur. Boorman at one time wanted to film J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Excalibur occasionally shimmers with the same grandeur that director Peter Jackson accomplished in his adaptations. Both movies tap into
Action/Adventure Rated PG-13
Director J.J. Abrams tries to bring some emotional resonance to the franchise, which up until now had all the soulfulness of a microscopic tracking device. This time we find Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt engaged and out of the field, at least until the shenanigans of a super-villain (Philip Seymour Hoffman) force him back to action.
Above everything else it has – SUV-sized bugs, dinosaur stampedes, streets of 1930s New York that are as vividly hustling and bustling as Michigan Avenue today – King Kong exudes an unabashed fondness for the 1933 creature feature it updates. This is the movies’ looniest love story, between a blond bombshell and a giant gorilla,
There’s only one way to explain the exhilarating and exhausting emptiness of Quentin Tarantino’s bloody revenge flick starring Uma Thurman. Facing a severe case of writer’s block, Tarantino must have tried to scribble his way out of it, couldn’t and decided to go ahead and make a movie out of the whims his writing exercises
