Young Adam's David MacKenzie makes an impressive directorial debut with this low-key but unpredictable thriller about two travellers who stumble across a strange community in the remote Scottish Highlands. It benefits from a nice mix of quirky humour and quiet menace, plus a sprinkling of the supernatural for good measure. Bleak, but still well worth the journey.
Potentially ridiculous premise about a cabal of gamblers who harness the power of, er, luck, is admirably sustained by gutsy turns from Leonardo Sbaraglia as a lucky plane crash survivor mentored by lucky earthquake survivor Eusebio Poncela in order to take revenge on casino owner and lucky holocaust survivor Max Von Sydow. Fractured narrative, arty mise-en-scène and punchy pacing from director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo also help.
The Omen echoes throughout Simon Wincer's camp but sporadically affecting 1980 re-imagining of Rasputin. Here the Mad Monk has been replaced by Robert Powell's mysterious glam-rock psychic healer, who cures the leukaemia-stricken son of venal senator David Hemmings and uses magic to expose the senator's crimes. It's clunky and dated, but Powell's typically messianic performance smoothes over the cracks.
Gung-ho navy flyboys Willem Dafoe and Brad Johnson, disillusioned with America's half-hearted prosecution of the war in Vietnam, attempt to hurry the conflict to a conclusion by taking it upon themselves to bomb Hanoi. Hilarious macho nonsense from John Milius at his most demented, in other words.
A key tome in the lovers-on-the-lam canon, with uncredited mastershots from a fledgling Martin Scorsese, Honeymoon Killers is the tale of a bloated, psychotic nurse (Shirley Stoler—Divine meets Louise Fletcher), her oily Spanish lover (Tony Lo Bianco) and the various needy, neurotic, half-witted women they deceive and murder. Startling photography, am-dram performances, and deeply misogynistic.
One of the most revered of Krzysztof Kieslowski's "10 commandments" series, the late director's determinedly bleak parable investigates a pointless murder and a lawyer's subsequent near-existential defence. Out the same year ('88) as A Short Film About Love, its intensity made the Polish maestro a global name.
Screenplay by the author Calder Willingham, generic domestics handled by Duvall's Pop and Diane Ladd's Mom, sexual disruptions dispensed by major-outfitted, Oscar-nominated Laura Dern as the teenage housekeeper. Her Rose has an earned rep, but Mom leaps to her defence. Mom's had enough of the South, too. The Button, Lukas Haas, pants and ogles from the sidelines.
