Michael Mann rebounded from 2001’s slack Ali with a film that – though you might not think it at first – is probably the most experimental and innovative of his career. 2004’s Collateral, though in some narrative respects a rather common thing, was one of the few films of the Age of Digital Filmmaking (maybe […]

The tempting thing would be to make some kind of jokes on the model of “Whatever Works doesn’t” and call it a day, but that’s a fairly unlovely pun, and besides, however far Woody Allen might fall in any given film from the heights of his greatest work, he deserves more respect than that kind […]

The golden age of the gialli was not all that long; it can be conveniently be bracketed by two Dario Argento films, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970 and Deep Red in 1975. Though examples would occasionally creep out after then – Argento himself has never truly abandoned the giallo style, up to […]

In a monstrously prolific career spanning over a hundred films across five decades, John Ford produced greater films than Young Mr. Lincoln, but perhaps not a single one that was more perfect or more Fordian: none of the others saw the same combination of the director’s fervent love of his country, his cynical humanist view […]

In 2007, noted moviemaking crazyperson Francis Ford Coppola ended a ten-year absence from cinema with Youth Without Youth, a self-indulgent, talky, artsy, pretentious mess of a motion picture. His follow-up, Tetro, is happily… well, I don’t know if I should call it a return to form, because who the hell can say what “form” is […]

And then the wave rolled back: after The Insider, in all its outsized magnificence, Michael Mann has never again made a film of such caliber. An indication of the state where he career landed itself in the ’00s can perhaps be squirreled out of the fact that for his 2001 follow-up (the two-year gap between […]

I did not like Transformers. I have come to think, in fact, that it is Michael Bay’s worst movie ever, just barely noodging out The Island, although it ought to be mentioned that I have not seen Pearl Harbor, and I’m fucking well disinclined to ever go out and see Pearl Harbor. But I was […]

For a woefully unconvincing summertime romantic comedy, The Proposal is not without a certain ramshackle, rickety old charm, like an abandoned barn out in the middle of a field somewhere deep in the plains states where every October, some entrepreneur sets up shop charging too much for pumpkins and the world’s saddest hayride. That is […]

Even as Heat was hot of the presses, Michael Mann was already gearing up for his next project: it was in late 1995 that an professional acquaintance of his named Lowell Bergman, an investigating reporter for 60 Minutes, was caught up in a nasty bit of business concerning a former Big Tobacco executive gone whistleblower, […]

Aspiring filmmakers looking to see how to make the most from a limited budget would do well to take a good long look at Duncan Jones’s Moon, a $5 million indie that’s the next thing to a one-man show, shot in a handful of sparsely decorated interiors. From these paltry ingredients, Jones (the son of […]

Harold Ramis’s new comedy of prehistoric times, Year One, manages to achieve something rare and special that only, literally two other movies that I can think of after some fair amount of reflection,* have ever achieved. It’s not a good thing. Year One is a motion picture comedy at which I did not laugh one […]

We now welcome a new director to the Summer of Blood, though not to the site: Mr. Lucio Fulci, whose last appearance in these pages was in regard to a pair of movies he made at either end of the great Italian zombie boom. One of these, Zombi 2, is quite probably the best Italian […]