Burton puts more of a premium on sound and image to suggest character depths than the more prosaic Christopher Nolan does.
Dirty Mary Crazy Larry boasts its fair share of quotable dialogue ranging between wistful philosophizing, off-the-cuff calumny, and cornball caricature.
For many years, I maintained a Top 10 list. It was changing all the time, but by the mid-1980s, I had pretty well nailed it down.
If you read my “Understanding Screenwriting” column at The House, you may be aware that I generally do not do Top 10 lists.
Preferential classification in the arts, based on arbitrary choice or empirical study, has a tendency to beget among the chattering classes some sort of mass hysteria.
To choose only 10 films for this list was a task at once simple and impossible.
They’re also unassailable in their perfection, and could easily fall at the top of any all-time best list arrived at by consensus.
In compiling my Top 10 film list, I tried to avoid obvious choices based on general consensus.
How do you distinguish a movie that’s one of the greatest of all time from one of your all-time favorites?
Eons ago, while still in high school, I composed a list of my all-time favorite films for the first time.
I’m a compulsive. It’s no surprise that my list is full of movies about compulsion.
We’ve stormed the gates and are now officially part of the canon-forming establishment…or (fingers crossed) the canon-altering anti-establishment.
The staging is so endlessly, even incestuously, self-referential as to earn the epithet mise-en-abyme.
Hell on Earth? Not quite.
For the first time, I can’t excuse the bull Clint Eastwood is selling.
David Chase is the king of the double-reversal.
It’s a cliché to be among the hordes who confess to being confounded by all the praise heaped on this movie.