New on Video: ‘Woman in the Moon’
Woman in the Moon is a sophisticated, successful synthesis of action with ideas, suspense with humor, and grand design with minute detail
Woman in the Moon is a sophisticated, successful synthesis of action with ideas, suspense with humor, and grand design with minute detail
We all know how the famous tagline goes: in space, no one can hear you scream. But in reality, the truth is a little more terrifying: in space, you literally can’t scream.
Director Ridley Scott shows amazing restraint as he scales back the pyrotechnics and emphasizes human ingenuity in ‘The Martian.’
The Martian is a fantastic movie — it cannot be stated quickly enough. Ridley Scott’s film about a man stranded on Mars after his crew evacuates without him is the director’s best work in years. The Martian features a stellar supporting cast, a well written script that’s clever and funny, and an Oscar caliber performance from a Hollywood A-lister at the top of his game.
Ridley Scott nostalgia is having an awful good week. Back in November there were talks that a sequel to Blade Runner, Scott’s 1982 sci-fi masterpiece, was in the works, but that Scott would be unable to direct due to schedule conflicts with Prometheus 2. Now however, a replacement has been found in Denis Villeneuve, Oscar …
Exodus: Gods and Kings Written by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine & Steven Zaillian Directed by Ridley Scott UK/USA/Spain, 2014 Perhaps the End Times are finally upon us. How else to explain a year that began with Russell Crowe playing Noah and ends with Christian Bale as Moses? Whereas Darren Aronofsky’s Noah reached …
40. Night of the Hunter (1955) Scene: The Preacher on the Horizon Video: http://youtu.be/9PyNL2ahKwc?list=PLZbXA4lyCtqolaQOAXly96de5FYQlPzqK Just like a few others in this section of the list, Charles Laughton’s brilliant Night of the Hunter isn’t really a horror film, but still sets out to keep the audience on edge. Starring a diabolical Robert Mitchum as a preacher/serial killer …
We can debate all day which comic book hero is cooler: DC or Marvel? Superman or Spiderman? Justice League or The Avengers? Batman or anyone who isn’t cool enough to be Batman? But it’s no question that Marvel has a serious leg-up on DC in the movie business. Outside of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, DC …
The term ‘Plot Hole’ has grown legs and begun a marathon sprint in the last few years. In most cases, the vast majority of accusations were false, revealing a common misunderstanding of what plot hole means.
What’s difficult about making this list is finding a balance between a successful Kubrickian film that either predates or pays homage to Kubrick and, for lack of a better term, is a ripoff. Now that we’ve hit the apex, it’s clear that these are, regardless of influence, quality films. What sets them apart is their …
When Steve Jobs launched the Macintosh, he had to generate buzz about a computer that was unfamiliar to most people. It was in 1984, that the relatively unknown computer company, launched a new product named after a particular type of Californian apple – the Macintosh – and in the process changed the world. There were …
It’s a classic chapter of Hollywood lore, one of those great cautionary tales of executive mismanagement and shattered dreams but Alien 3’s production also brought a solid and respectable sequel butchered in post, one that can be found in the rough and tumble Assembly Cut.
In his later years, the novelist Cormac McCarthy has circled like a vulture around the theme of death, specifically its inevitable grip on humanity. No Country for Old Men and The Road presented very different worlds, both filled with men trying desperately to withstand the inexorable hand of the reaper, and eventually realizing that there wasn’t much left but to give into what comes for us all. Such an existential fear is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the foundation of McCarthy’s newest foray, his screenplay for the crime thriller The Counselor. Its director is the prolific Ridley Scott, and its cast is impressively stacked, but this is a McCarthy story through and through, which is mostly heartening news.
The concept of the sci-fi horror genre allows us to address the built-in terrors and tensions developed in society that are difficult, if not impossible, to actualize and confront directly. It has the strengths of sci-fi’s ability to question our potential as a developed species, breaking current conceptions of reality to attain a scenario that …
Marko Manev’s Blade Runner print is to be released for sales on Tuesday, August 20th at www.BottleneckGallery.com at around 12pm eastern. The Giclee print from Marko, titled Mother, and inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho, also goes on sale at the same time.
If you flashback to the early 00’s, there was still a sense of excitement and anticipation at the announcement of Ridley Scott working on a new project. This was a visionary director who’s expansive, ambitious and heart capturing visual eye had given the world of cinema such wonders as Alien and Blade Runner, masterpieces of …
Various directors take very differing stances when it comes to the ongoing threat of executive meddling. This, of course, is when the studio moneymen stop what you’re doing and tell you that what you’ve made will simply not cut it at the box office, that key demographics that their marketing department has been stringently working on (usually in the form of charts) will dislike your movie.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock since the Oscars, you’ve heard about the controversies surround Argo’s (lack of) historical accuracy. Whether it’s Iran threatening to sue Ben Affleck and George Clooney, Canada feeling relegated to postscript of history, or most recently the parliament in New Zealand motioning that Affleck “saw fit to mislead the …
For better or worse, films don’t exist in a vacuum. If literature derives from itself, and, according to Marshall McLuhan, the content in any new medium is always the same as in the old, then films don’t exactly have a wealth of opportunities to be original. You can always compare a film to one that …
Grabbers Directed by Jon Wright Written by Kevin Lehane Ireland, 2012 For a movie about aliens, Grabbers feels all-too-familiar. Reaching as far back as Ridley Scott’s Alien, Grabbers is a perfectly serviceable and well-cultivated collection of creature features, but, despite its earnest convictions, it lacks a certain novelty to garner any postmortem traction. The movie …
Ever since the birth of the concept in the early eighties, the prospect of a ‘Director’s Cut’ has become one of the most mouth watering morsels for film fanatics, a chance to glimpse an expanded version or in some cases a radically altered vision to their favorite movies. Whether it be the lengthening of an …
In the late 1970s and 1980s, composer Giorgio Moroder was often accused of trying to replace the orchestral movie soundtrack with high-energy, synthesizer-heavy disco pop laid on with a trowel in movies like Thank God It’s Friday (1978), Flashdance (1983), Scarface (1983), and Top Gun (1986). I remember a magazine story on Moroder which quoted …
With the director’s latest, Prometheus, promising to be one of this year’s better efforts, I felt it necessary to take a long overdue first look at Ridley Scott’s widely lauded sci-fi/horror hybrid. It’s easily one of the better entries to ever grace both genres, I’ll give it that, and even despite its age, Alien holds …