I have long thought that Angel Heart is one of those films that substitutes plot for atmosphere and comes out the other end on a zero sum game. However, this time around I find myself more entranced by the atmosphere and increasingly uninterested in plot, in any form.

Angel Heart is psycho-sexual thriller, with elements of horror. Parker treads the line between neo-noir and horror pretty well, though you get the feeling that his heart is more in the mystery…

1917 is an interesting exercise. I should be completely on board with a film choosing to be a disaster movie in a war setting rather than being a war film, but I felt it was without character. I love disaster movies, I love war films, but both are typically redolent with character and drama. This is just an exercise. Thus, I admired it as pure spectacle but I couldn't give it anything more. It didn't deserve anything more.

It lacks…

American Gigolo is another of Paul Schrader's "God's lonely man" films. His quartet being Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and The Walker. They are a fascinating set of films, as much for their flaws, as for their successes. They are character studies of opaque, egotistical demons, increasingly pathetic and less dangerous with age. They mirror Schrader himself, and his own career. American Gigolo is the second of quartet and the first directed by Schrader. The film is built around…

Warren Beatty's Reds has to be considered perhaps the most ambitious, frankly crazy, film released by mainstream Hollywood. It is, in 1981, a sympathetic, if critical, look at the 1917 Russian Revolution. The film focuses on the life and career of John Reed, the journalist and writer who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. It mixes the personal and the political, spending a good deal of time looking at Reed's relationship with Louise Bryant (the amazing Diane Keaton, more…