Gravity (2013)

Gravity (2013)

[6]

Gravity is so harrowing, I’m tempted to call it crisis porn. The movie stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts stranded in orbit over Earth after debris destroys their spacecraft. Director Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, A Little Princess) warns us from the get-go with some on-screen text that life in space is impossible, and then proceeds to throw everything you can imagine at Bullock and Clooney’s characters. They’ve got dwindling oxygen supplies, they’ve got the debris looping back around at them every ninety minutes, their spacesuits are running out of propulsion, and their connection to Huston has gone dark. There are the threats of burning alive, freezing to death, drowning, and slipping into coma. They see other members of their crew frozen solid, flesh exposed to the vacuum of space — one guy with a tidy hole clean through his head.

Born to Be Bad (1934)

Born to Be Bad (1934)

[6] Cary Grant and Loretta Young star in this pre-Code drama about a devious mother and her young son who feign injury to fleece a wealthy businessman after a minor car accident. Hollywood is known for neat and tidy little…
High Anxiety (1977)

High Anxiety (1977)

[6]

Mel Brooks sends up Alfred Hitchcock in High Anxiety, a spoof centered around a psychiatrist who uncovers shenanigans at ‘The Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, VERY Nervous’.  Brooks plays the shrink, a man who must cope with his own ‘high anxiety’ while getting to the bottom of a murder mystery before the Institute’s nefarious head nurse and former administrator order him killed! Cloris Leachman and Harvey Korman are stand-outs as the villains. In one scene, you see the hunch-backed, mustached Leachman don a Nazi uniform when she lashes the bound Korman during a clandestine S&M session.

Don Jon (2013)

Don Jon (2013)

[7]

Future Oscar-winner (I’ve been saying this since 2001’s Manic) Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes an auspicious writing/directing debut with Don Jon, a character study of a young New Jersey guy whose addiction to pornography takes its toll on his relationships with women. Gordon-Levitt pumped up to play the title character, but I hope he drops the muscle mass soon — his head’s too small for a body that big! The film is superbly cast. Scarlett Johansson impresses me for the first time ever here, playing a sex-pot who knocks Jon off his feet. Tony Danza and Glenne Headly are great as Jon’s parents, and the ever-reliable Julianne Moore is memorable as a quirky but sullen older woman who competes for Jon’s affections as the story wears on.

Forbidden World (1982)

Forbidden World (1982)

[5]

Somehow, Roger Corman’s rip-offs tend to be the best around. This one takes aim at Alien, centering around a team of scientists who accidentally breed a genetic mutant that escapes and starts eating them, all one by one. The dialogue is atrocious in a ‘so bad, it’s good’ kinda way and the special effects are hit-and-miss, but Tim Suhrstedt’s cinematography is far better than usual for B-movie’s of this sort. Since Corman’s involved, you also get a healthy dose of extraneous sex and boobage. Director Allan Holzman inter-cuts one of the sex scenes with a kill sequence to interesting effect, and you have to love it when dull exposition is delivered by two female scientists while they sponge-bathe each other in the shower.

Overboard (1987)

Overboard (1987)

[6] A nasty heiress (Goldie Hawn) falls off her yacht and gets amnesia, only to be discovered by a handyman (Kurt Russell) she once screwed over. To get revenge, he convinces her that she's his wife and the mother of…
Only God Forgives (2013)

Only God Forgives (2013)

[7]

Against a backdrop of the Bangkok underground fighting scene, a reticent drug smuggler (Ryan Gosling) is caught in a vicious cycle of brutal revenge after his brother is murdered for committing rape. Only God Forgives plays out like a fever dream, a far more operatic and surreal effort from writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn than his earlier mainstream hit, Drive. There is precious little dialogue, hyper-stylized photography, a brash score by Cliff Martinez, and a willful tendency to blur the line between reality and the characters’ imaginations.

Casualties of War (1989)

Casualties of War (1989)

[7] Michael J. Fox stars in this Vietnam War flick from Brian DePalma, but combat isn't the focus here. Fox plays a soldier who puts his life on the line when he tries to free a young Vietnamese woman that…
Silent Movie (1976)

Silent Movie (1976)

[5] Three charlatan filmmakers try to save a studio from corporate takeover by uniting all of Hollywood's biggest stars into one big movie -- a silent one! And the title of this Mel Brooks yuk fest isn't an empty boast…
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

[5] Eternal opportunist Roger Corman piggy-backs on the success of Star Wars with this low-budget space adventure about a young man who assembles a rag-tag team of mercenaries to protect his people when another race threatens enslavement. Battle Beyond the…