Drawing from his one-act comedy play “Death,” Woody Allen expanded his Franz Kafka riff into an overt homage to German Expressionism, that moody film style characterized by shadowy B&W cinematography where daylight is barely seen,..
A gamble for Mike Medavoy’s fledgling Phoenix Films and ultimately a box office and critical dud upon its theatrical release, U-Turn’s evolved into an undiscovered classic of modern noir if not a cult film, and one of Oliver Stone’s best films of the 1990s where every instinct almost yields a perfect result…
One could present a fair argument that this film version of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s novel The Prone Gunman is a film noir veiled in a series of extended action montages, mostly because its leading character, a sniper named Terrier is a ‘dogged’ figure whose past comes to bite him in the ass, and mandates fast action and revenge…
According to Oliver Stone, Heaven & Earth isn’t part of his ‘Vietnam Trilogy’ – there isn’t one, just a series of films dealing with aspects of the war instead of recurring characters – but it’s certainly an interesting choice in subject, coming after the autobiographical Platoon (1986) and the bio-drama Born on the Fourth of July (1989)…
Timothy and Tony Bui’s chronicle of newly arrived refugees from Vietnam in 1975 is what you’d call a forgotten film – a small, carefully crafted drama that outside of select markets probably had little screen time, and whose 2002 DVD is an old non-anamorphic transfer…
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