This week’s releases include a reboot, a Jennifer Lawrence horror movie that will feel like a few other thrillers, and a hard-to-decipher Clint Eastwood film.
Paul Haggis often has a way of beating his audience over the head with cultural rhetoric, particularly if we look at Crash as an example. At the same time, a film like Million Dollar Baby – while ostensibly about pugilism and then euthanasia – is actually much more about our cultural obsession with violence, but the hypocrisy […]
(Take 5 is a recurring column in which we gather up five of our favorite Movies About Gladiators contributors and ask them a few questions about cinema. This edition is extra special because we have six people answering. Below are their responses.) 1. Why is it seemingly so difficult to make a successful trilogy? Dustin Freeley: For […]
The rapper K’naan has a song that begins: “Until the lion learns to speak/the tales of hunting will be weak” It implies an empathic view of history. And a simple one, too. The perspective of the hunted would, of course, be far different than the perspective of the hunter. But what if the lion could speak? What tale […]
The prison film might be the genre most antithetical to how we view heroes and villains. As opposed to films set in courtrooms where the victim usually wins and the bad guy goes to jail to contemplate his or her crimes, the protagonists in prison films are often the guilty party, the ones who couldn’t get away […]
What’s ostensibly a Western driven by the remedying of an injustice, Unforgiven is really an exploration into how perceived identity defines value, whether it centers on William Munny (Clint Eastwood), a “known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition,” who was cured of “drinking and wickedness” by his deceased wife, or whether the […]
