Badlands (1973)

A rare success among many attempts to make a movie which has the heroic heft of epic verse

A beautiful and profound meditation on the claims of a very little, very fragile human life upon eternity

Wild Things, directed by John McNaughton and written by Stephen Peters, is superior quality 90s noir — which means, as I have said before, noir without any moral compass whatsoever. It’s too bad because this could have been a good film. It has clever plotting, good dialogue (without being overfull of wisecracks and strained attempts…

Safe Men written and directed by John Hamburg is that rare thing, a Tarantino-clone that nevertheless manages to be rather witty and charming. Sam (Sam Rockwell) and Eddie (Steve Zahn) are a couple of absolutely awful itinerant singers in Providence, Rhode Island who are but dimly aware of how bad they are. Sam, in particular,…

The Opportunists by Myles Connell is a pleasant surprise. To some extent, it represents a throwback to the good old days in Hollywood when even the most hard-boiled gangster movies, or movies later taken to have glorified the criminal life, could be relied upon to portray a moral world characterized by inflexible certainty about what…

Thanks to our 21^st century taste for exhibitionism, documentaries are now a better bet for revealing and harrowing portrayals of domestic and family life than fiction