[71/100]
I was absolutely not expecting this to be a precursor to Single White Female and Fatal Attraction-type movies, but I was pleasantly enthralled by just how far Leave Her To Heaven was willing to go, to the point where I wondered several times how this managed to get by the Hayes code. From the start, I was very taken with Ellen's total weirdness - her very assertive courtship style, her strange reactions to things, her insistence on winning competitions…
[63/100]
As I noted in my recent review of The Descent, I just really like this subgenre of squirmy, impossibly-high stakes suspense movies. My love for that kind of visceral discomfort in a movie-watching experience even extends to something like The Walk, which is otherwise pretty different. The biggest disappointment in this case is that instead of just lopping off the excruciatingly pointless 1st hour of The Wages of Fear, Friedkin just replaces it with some pointless bullshit of his…
This was a true B-movie in the best way possible. The whole thing was like a cartoon world come to life - goofy gangs in their hilarious costumes trying to prevent the cowboy-vested Warriors from making their way back home to Coney Island. What I really loved was the use of space. It was extremely atmospheric, and the settings were wonderfully fleshed out, like the levels of a video game. Each scene, the Warriors encounter a new location, like a…
On second viewing, OUT OF THE PAST still didn't do too much for me. It's got beautiful, atmospheric location shooting, cool noir dialgoue, wonderful use of lighting, and two of my favorite actors in Mitchum and Douglas. But I find it very hard to keep up, as the story seems to twist and turn a million times without any meaningful milestones. Mitchum's unphased reaction to everything that happens is suave but it also saps the movie of feeling. I found it cerebral rather than moody, and too internalized to make a more universal statement about memory/personal history/the past.
