Jeremiah Kipp

The Caine Mutiny is not distinctive filmmaking or storytelling, and its idea of ethical debate is relying on familiar archetypes and arguments. It sure is standard, though. It’s like the well-constructed house that’s not meant to be distinctive, but was made to endure.

Now, Voyager is the stuff of young lovers and hare-brained idealists, and if it can feel pretty foolish at times, it’s unforgettable for how sincere and affectionate it is toward one particularly time-honored cliché: that only fools falls in love.

At least the dancing is good, and Vincente Minnelli’s restless camera gooses a plodding story into liveliness.

It is almost as though these filmmakers are afraid they’ll never get the chance to make another one, and Re-Animator doesn’t hesitate in being an almost operatic, larger than life comedy of splatter. While it paints with a big (red) brush, it is never boring.

The non-musical performances are shallow: Douglas is forceful but one-note, Day is as square and wholesome as a glass of milk, and Bacall purrs along in the same faux-bad girl performance she’s given for the past 60 years. But I suppose that’s fitting for a morality play this black and white, where wild jazz, liquor, and loose women cause the downfall of man.

The horny teenagers all seem like banal, plastic, eager-to-please refugees from a sitcom, desperately hoping with their every line of dialogue for a canned laugh.

The tone is crude, raunchy, and leering, with kill scenes combined with more nudity than usual; we’re even invited to check out a hot chick’s body after her face has been sliced in half by garden shears.

A stark, eerie and unrelenting parable of dread. There’s a brute force in Night of the Living Dead that catches one in the throat.

Made on the cheap and inspired by early Romero, this zombie flick doesn’t even have the dead rise until the final half-hour. Until then, we’re stuck with an amateur theater troupe chattering away as they venture out to an abandoned island for a goofy séance.

It has the unfortunate effect of being a movie that seems stuck on a Broadway stage.

This strange time capsule of late 1960s dementia more or less lives up to its oddball reputation—too unnerving to fall into the category of horror comedies but too cutesy to be labeled as a straight-up shocker a la The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In other words, it’s unclassifiable, which has amplified its cult appeal.

By now, everyone knows what to expect from this kind of movie, but what’s surprising is how the low-budget rawness, cheap film stock bubbling over with grain, and washed-out lighting schemes give the film a kind of base in reality.

Poitier’s acting is scalding hot. If The Blackboard Jungle is worth anything, it’s for bearing witness to a major star in the making.

Suffice to say, this small offering from the horror genre is a hoot to watch, with never a dull moment.

Dickey taps into that stark mortal terror of abandoning control, where to become a wild man is somehow a form of connection.

Bringing Up Baby has some delightfully comic sequences, for sure. But I’m less inclined to remember the dynamics of the gag than Grant and Hepburn’s timing.

Though its craft is accomplished, the film never gets deep under one’s skin the way it ought to.

Strong performances and a fiery aggressive tone keep things moving, but A Face in the Crowd is dated and not particularly deep.

The exhaustive, labyrinthine narrative is built up like a fortress around this film’s bitter heart.

Alice, Sweet Alice conflates the angst of adolescent sexual development with the fury of Catholic retribution, suggesting at times an analog version of David Fincher’s Se7en.

What makes Phantasm special is the way it captures a boy's life in 1978. [Remastered]

This isn’t simply another version of the mythologizing tactics that saw Bonnie Parker emulating the flappers from Gold Diggers of 1933 in Bonnie and Clyde. Altman refuses to romanticize his characters’ impressionable innocence, but nor is he resolute to assert cultural impregnability either. Instead, Altman’s emphasis lies in locating the specificities of historical time and understanding how socially constructed mythologies come to proliferate in the first place.

The film has a peculiar magic to it, and because of its pace the richness of its sense of detail often goes unnoticed.

At 80 minutes, its cinematic flash fiction, and a suitable entry point into the lively body of work Cassavetes made.

Don Coscarelli outdoes the humor of John Hughes in what feels like a more honest version of the gleeful sadism in Home Alone.

If you watch Clockwork Orange and see that this is the game Kubrick is playing with us, giving us an avenue into understanding a corrosion of society, the film may be appreciated as his finest masterwork in a career full of them. Certainly, it’s his most human film, right next to Lolita in its refusal to judge its central character’s sickness.

The film doesn't so much bring us closer to the serial murderer as it reminds us of our culpability as spectators.

Even though we would see more of Jason over the years (first as a zombie, then battling a telekinetic super-girl, taking on Freddy Krueger within his own warped dreams, even hacking teens to bits in outer space), this one certainly felt as if it properly closed out the Friday the 13th series before it devolved into unadulterated camp.