Nicholas Ray films are, at their best, incredibly modern psychological character studies in the guise of then-contemporary genre pictures. He’s done it with teen dramas, westerns and now with In A Lonely Place, noir.
Dixon Steele is a man shaped by the two great American institutions: War and Hollywood. War turns him distant, violent and self-destructive while Hollywood turns him self-absorbed, isolated and desensitised. All it takes is a classic case of “wrong man, wrong time” to drive him to…
Easy Rider is a very good film, no doubt, but it feels fair to say that a lot of what makes it good comes from the vibe it captures in the moment. One of the many faults you can have with it is that it doesn’t do a very good job of actually exploring its central rebels as actual characters. It’s a movie that’s in-step with its leads and assumes you're along for the ride.
Five Easy Pieces, made only…
No one shoots grasshoppers like Terry.
I would say it's redundant to mention how stunningly and beautifully Days of Heaven is shot, but it really can't be said enough. Pale blues, distant greens, permanent blurring of dawn and dusk painted on endless golden fields, at odds with pulsing, crowded unity of laborious machines and their many attendants. It's an almost biblical depiction of nature as this endless, rolling ode to a greater beauty, with us humans as the ants that…
Elevated Horror has officially entered its self-parody era.
The kind of plodding, moralistic and pretentious faux-horror sham that tries way, WAY too hard to be both mysterious and surreal about its ideas and also blindingly obvious so you don’t miss how clever it is. Every time the film is not quietly being weird, it's just being boring, stuffing itself with slow conversations that exist only to repeat the subtext (the only subtext being “MEN BAD” written in big letters) so…
