Priest (review)
Hey! It’s a supernatural horror flick about the clash between the power of the institution of The Church and the power of personal faith and belief. Oh, and also about kicking vampire ass.
western
Rango (review)
How can it be that a kiddie movie is wiser and funnier and more relevant than the Coens Brothers’ True Grit? This is, in fact, what a Coens’ animated flick might look like and sound like, if they got an assist from Terry Giliam: this is a deeply weird and deeply demented movie, and thrillingly so.
True Grit (review)
There’s a sense of something great just beyond the grasp of the Coen Brothers, something that they may not even be aware of, hanging over this elegant yet somehow vaguely unfinished film.
Jonah Hex (review)
If Jonah Hex can talk to the dead, then he’s probably the only one (apart from Ned the Pie Man) who could have any meaningful interaction with this movie.
Stagecoach (review)
It’s an enormous pleasure to see a film such as John Ford’s 1939 masterpiece via the Criterion Collection’s two-disc set, new in Region 1…
Wagon Train: The Complete Color Season (review)
The only bell *Wagon Train* rings for me is its role in the story of how Gene Roddenberry first pitched *Star Trek* to NBC — he now famously said that it would be “*Wagon Train* to the stars.” Which I never quite understood.
Australia (review)
If director Baz Luhrmann had decided to shoot in black-and-white, you’d hardly be able to tell this wasn’t made around 1939 or so. Sure, all those gorgeous helicopter shots of the wild and dangerous and beautiful Outback would be a dead giveaway, so they’d have to go. But otherwise…
There Will Be Blood movie review: Citizen Plainview
There Will Be Blood slaps you in the face. It’s Joe Pesci in Goodfellas raging, “Do I amuse you? Do I entertain you?” in that way that suggests that it could not give two figs what you think of it.
3:10 to Yuma (review)
This is inventive and exciting, a grip-the-armrests, hold-your-breath reinvigorating of the Western movie…
Zachariah movie review
It’s Help! in the Old West, or The Quick and the Deadheads. This “electric western” musical comedy isn’t quite a hero’s journey, more a hero’s trip. It probably helps to be stoned.
