this relatively unsung drama laid bare the devastation the previous pandemic wreaked over the gay Neighborhood. It was the first film dealing with the subject of AIDS to receive a wide theatrical release.
‘s Rupert Everett as Wilde that is something of the epilogue on the action in the older film. For some romantic musings from Wilde and many others, check out these love rates that will make you weak while in the knees.
Considering the plethora of podcasts that inspire us to welcome brutal murderers into our earbuds each week (and how eager many of us are to do so), it may be hard to assume a time when serial killers were a genuinely taboo subject. In many ways, we have “The Silence on the Lambs” to thank for that paradigm change. Jonathan Demme’s film did as much to humanize depraved criminals as any bit of modern art, thanks in large part to some chillingly magnetic performance from Anthony Hopkins.
The terror of “the footage” derived from watching the almost pathologically ambitious Heather (Heather Donahue) begin to deteriorate as she and her and her crew members Josh (Joshua Leonard) and Mike (Michael C. Williams) get lost in the forest. Our disbelief was successfully suppressed by a DYI aesthetic that interspersed reduced-quality video with 16mm testimonials, each giving validity on the nonfiction concept in their personal way.
Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter is among the great villains in film history, pairing his heinous acts with just the right level of warm-still-slightly-off charm as he lulls Jodie Foster into a cat-and-mouse game with the ages. The film needed to walk an extremely fragile line to humanize the character without ever falling into the traps of idealization or caricature, but Hopkins, Foster, and Demme were ready to do exactly that.
auteur’s most endearing Jean Reno character, his most discomforting portrayal of a (very) young woman on the verge of a (very) personal transformation, and his most instantly percussive Éric Serra score. It prioritizes cool style over common sense at every possible juncture — how else to clarify Léon’s superhuman ability to fade into the shadows and crannies of your Manhattan apartments where he goes about his business?
It’s no accident that “Porco Rosso” is about at the height with the interwar period, the film’s hyper-fluid animation and general air of frivolity shadowed because of the looming specter of fascism as well as a deep feeling of future nostalgia for all that would be forfeited to it. But there’s also such a rich vein of fun to it — this can be a movie that feels as breezy and ecstatic as traveling a Ghibli plane through a clear summer afternoon (or at least as ecstatic as it makes that nacho vidal feel).
“Admit it isn’t all cool calculation with you – that you’ve got a heart – even if it’s small and feeble and you can’t remember the last time you used it,” Marcia Gay Harden’s femme fatale demands of protagonist Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). And for all its steely violence, this film has a heart as well.
Nearly thirty years later, “Bizarre Days” can be a hard watch a result of the onscreen brutality against Black folks and women, family stroke and because through today’s cynical eyes we know such footage rarely enacts the alter desired. Even so, Bigelow’s alluring and visually arresting film continues to enrapture because it so perfectly thai street whore loves being creampied by foreigners captures the misplaced hope of its time. —RD
“After Life” never clarifies itself — Quite the opposite, it’s presented with the boring matter-of-factness of another Monday morning with the office. Somewhere, within the tranquil limbo between this world and also the next, there is a spare but peaceful facility where the dead are interviewed about their lives.
Where does one even start? No film on this list — approximately and including the similarly conceived “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” — comes with a higher barrier of entry than “The tip of Evangelion,” just as no film on this list is as quick to antagonize its target viewers. Essentially a mulligan about the last two episodes of Hideaki Anno’s totemic anime sequence “Neon Genesis Evangelion” nikki benz (and also a reverse shot of types for what happens in them), this biblical mental breakdown about giant mechas plus the rebirth of life in the world would be complete gibberish for anyone who didn’t know their NERVs from their SEELEs, or assumed the Human Instrumentality Project, was just some warm new yoga trend.
For such a singular artist and aesthete, Wes Anderson has always been comfortable with wearing his influences on his sleeve, rightly showing confidence that he can celebrate his touchstones without resigning to them. For evidence, just look at just how his characters worship each other in order to find themselves — from Ned Plimpton’s childhood obsession with Steve Zissou, wonderful teen blonde gal scarlet red feels well on top to your moderate awe that Gustave H.
, Justin Timberlake beautifully negotiates the bumpy terrain from disapproval to acceptance to love.
Time seems to have stood still in this place with its black-and-white Television established and rotary phone, a couple of lonely pumpjacks groaning outside furnishing the only sound or movement for miles. (A “Make America Great Again” sticker around the back of a beat-up vehicle is vaguely amusing but seems gratuitous, and it shakes us from the film’s foggy mood.)