[5] A girl from the San Fernando valley (Deborah Foreman) falls for a city boy (Nicolas Cage), much to the chagrin of superficial friends. Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl hit the scene just as John Hughes began directing his string of iconic teen flicks, and was probably just as influential in setting the 80s teen trend as any of Hughes’ work. The film is beloved for …
[7] Nicolas Cage stars in his most interesting movie in many years. He plays an ex-con in an impoverished Southern community who becomes an unlikely role model for a 15-year old boy (Mud‘s Tye Sheridan) who is dealing with an increasingly abusive, alcoholic father (Gary Poulter). Cage and Sheridan are top-notch, and Garry Hawkins’ screenplay, based on Larry Brown’s novel, never stoops to sentimentality. Director David …
[6] [Warning: This review contains spoilers.] Spike Jonze directs this meta tale of a screenwriter losing his mind trying to adapt a book called The Orchid Thief. While his twin brother moves in and begins mirroring him in many ways, he decides he needs to find the author of the book to excavate its meaning. If you can’t already tell, Adaptation is a very hard …
[5] Personally, I’m not sure when I’ll ever be “ready” to see any dramatizations of September 11th, 2001. I definitely don’t want to see those events sensationalized. Thankfully, Oliver Stone exercises restraint with the material, opting to show the film almost entirely from two characters’ points of view. World Trade Center is a claustrophobic survival story centered around real-life survivors John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and …
[6] Matt Dillon stars in this Francis Ford Coppola film about a high school hooligan who’s infamous older brother (Mickey Rourke) comes back to town to try and change his bleak outlook on life. Rumble Fish is based on a novel by The Outsiders author, S.E. Hinton. It’s a less compelling story and lacks a strong narrative through-line. Dillon does a fine job carrying the …
[9] David Lynch’s surreal cinematic mash-up of love and depravity won the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or. It’s a surprisingly simple story about two fierce lovers, Sailor and Lula (Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern) who try to keep their heads above water in a world gone, almost literally, to Hell. The overt Wizard of Oz references serve as a constant reminder that you’re watching …
[10] Holly Hunter and Nicolas Cage star as Ed and Hi, a police woman and a supposedly reformed felon who try to start a family in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Raising Arizona. But when they can’t conceive a child of their own, they decide to kidnap a tot from a wealthy couple who just had septuplets. The demands of new parenthood take their toll on …
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