To say this ultraviolent 1983 flick is Chuck Norris'best movie might smack of faint praise, but what's good is mostly down to David Carradine as his strutting, butt-kicking, cigar-sucking nemesis. It's a modern-day western, heavy on the spaghetti, with Norris'Texas ranger taking on Carradine's gun-runner and his army of disposable borderland Mexicans. Did Walter Hill watch this before making Extreme Prejudice?
Another reworking of the Betty Blue mythology, with the always watchable Valeria Golino as the Sicilian free spirit who is deemed nuts by her husband and run out of town for such sins as spontaneity and unconventionality. Sun-baked scenery and a lurch into magical realism at the end makes it more than the sum of its parts.
A fascinating study in waning star power disguised as a cop movie, disguised as a comedy, this reveals the Harrison Ford screen persona at its most intransigent, here playing a 'big dog' cop who hates rap music and yoga, punches people, solves murders and sleeps with Lena Olin.
A contemporary coming-of-ager about a fiery 12-year-old Maori girl (Keisha Castle-Hughes) and her bid for the hyper-masculine tribal throne, Whale Rider is full of apposite Disney pluck, yet simultaneously shot through with a worthy, odd and inexorably cloying adoration of the mystical juju in Maori tradition.
Directing, co-writing and starring, Matt Dillon does a pretty solid job. Set in a modern-day Cambodia full of outcasts and fugitives, the plot slowly curdles from globe-trotting crime thriller into primal psycho-weirdness. Dillon never shakes off the second-hand influences, notably David Lynch and Apocalypse Now, but a rich cosmopolitan texture is added by an eccentric cast including Gerard Depardieu, Stellan Skarsgård and James Caan.
Originally a TV mini series, this is a satisfying, three-hour adaptation of Larry McMurty's offbeat and poignant take on Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. A strong cast (Anjelica Houston, Sam Elliott, Peter Coyote) get blown off the screen by Jack Palance as a grizzled, dusty old trapper.
Quirky variant on the Frankenstein riff. Klaus Kinski is a scientist working on a space station with his android assistant Max404 (Don Opper, who co-wrote). Max is going through android adolescence—he's restless, sulky, curious about sex. Then a trio of escaped convicts invade, and one of them's a girl. Funny and compelling, and worth catching for Opper's geeky performance alone.
Mesmerising Japanese study of voyeurism and eroticism. Shot in black and white but colourfully performed by Asuka Kurosawa as a repressed wife who's blackmailed by a stranger into—wait for it—masturbating in public places. In lesser hands it'd be tat, but there's a Cronenberg-like claustrophobia to the seediness. Porn, then, but arty porn.
Volker Schlöndorff's hallucinatory adaptation of Günter Grass' novel is a slow build. Like Apocalypse Now, with whom it shared the 1979 Palme D'Or at Cannes, it's an allegorical war movie with a trippy central conceit—three-year-old Oskar (David Bennent), disgusted by petty-bourgeois post-war Poland, refuses to mature into adulthood and instead opts for a surreal journey into the dark heart of Nazism. While his Danzig neighbourhood is consumed by Hitler frenzy, Oskar is subjected to Nazi dwarves, decapitated donkeys and suicide by raw eel overdose.
