“‘Year of the Dragon’ offers little comfort, and when it does, Cimino heavily suggests its victories are hollow and insincere. It is a dark-mirror exercise in genre fragmentation that shatters the vigilante cop thriller into thousands of pieces and lays its ugliest instincts frighteningly bare.”
“Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy has become THE Batman interpretation, heralded for its gritty realism. But in my book, ‘Batman’ is the better comicbook movie.”
“Looking back at a film like ‘Rocky IV,’ we can’t just say ‘wow, look how dumb we were back then’ because the simple truth is that we haven’t earned the right. We are still making the same mistakes, still falling for the same macho con.”
“Some of Avildsen’s men turn to violence. Some of them turn to crime. Some of them turn inward. All of them know that somehow, some way, they must turn. They cannot survive, let alone win, without surrendering some part of themselves.”
“Frank Henenlotter and his films have the demeanor of a naughty uncle making wild, dirty jokes while telling a campfire ghost story. He wants you to take the material seriously, but he’s mostly concerned with you having a great time.”
“In ‘Crash,’ sex feels like a traffic accident. In ‘Videodrome,’ it becomes the subject of a warped, projected fantasy.”
“The real strength of ‘Inferno’ is the dominant sense of terror that Argento creates through his mastery of physical space (shaded by bright reds and blues, contrastive images of grandeur and decay in the production design)…”
“The vomit moment in ‘Dead Bang’ is unfailingly human.”
“Identity, like meaning in ‘Dekalog,’ is delivered piecemeal. Do immediate deeds define a person, or are these characters more than what they do in any given episode?”
“At the heart of ‘Prince of Darkness,’ the failures of religion and science reflect the limits of the human mind to grasp the immensity of the universe and our menial position within it.”
“‘American Gigolo’ doesn’t necessarily work as a neo-noir, but it still has enough romance and intrigue to be well worth watching.”
“‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ captures the imaginations of young viewers while imploring the older among them to let common sense go in order to enjoy the pop music and irrefutable heart.”