Not quite the outright remake of The Wild Bunch it's often written up as, but still by some distance Walter Hill's most explicit homage to Sam Peckinpah. Based on a story by John Milius, 1987's Extreme Prejudice pitches upright Texas Ranger Jack Benteen (a suitably monolithic Nick Nolte) against old buddy Cash Bailey (a colourfully demented Powers Boothe), a former DEA enforcer turned major drug baron who's flooding the US with massive amounts of cocaine from his Mexican fortress, where he's surrounded by a small army of heavily-armed desperadoes.
French director Chris Marker's short "film novel" from 1962, La Jetée, couples sequential still photographs with narration to tell the tale of a time-traveller from a post-apocalyptic future coming to the present day (Terry Gilliam remade it as Twelve Monkeys in 1995). Marker's feature-length philosophical 1983 travelogue Sans Soleil focuses on the subjects of Tokyo and the nature of memory.
Time has been kind to Less Than Zero. This kitschy exposé of teenage dysfunction in Beverly Hills, now freed from the weight of Bret Easton Ellis, has much in it to admire, from the fluorescent art direction and uber-'80s soundtrack to Andrew McCarthy's glassy-eyed performance and Robert Downey Jr's eerily prescient depiction of a rehab recidivist.
Hal Ashby's unsatisfactory Woody Guthrie biopic from 1976 uses a shovelful of sentiment to flatten out most of the bumps in Guthrie's life, but David Carradine contributes a glorious, low-key performance as the visionary legend who travelled his country throughout the Great Depression, singing for the beat-down folk and fighting off the Fascists. The real star, though, is Haskell Wexler's radiant dustbowl cinematography.
Johnny Knoxville and his cohorts torture, humiliate and occasionally shave themselves and others in this big-screen outing for the cult TV show. Much of their wanton destruction and reckless self-endangerment you can take or leave, but the bowling ball in the bollocks induces a major wince, as does the bungee wedgie and the between-toe paper-cutting.
Brendan Fraser is an American aid worker in Vietnam who just might be masterminding a US-backed anticommunist coup while seducing Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), the classically demure oriental lover of cynical British hack Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine). An intriguing, morally muddy adaptation of Graham Greene via director Philip Noyce.
Two cops are shot at; the survivor (John Savage) is ostracised by his colleagues for alleged cowardice, which takes him years to live down. Joseph Wambaugh's novel was faithfully treated by Harold Becker in this 1979 curate's egg, but brilliant as Savage is, it's an up-and-coming, intense actor named James Woods who lights the bonfire.
