[9] An off-duty police officer takes it upon himself to stop a gang of German terrorists who take an office Christmas party hostage in John McTiernan’s iconic action film, Die Hard. Let me put it another way: Die Hard is The Action Movie. It built a new paradigm for the genre and launched a movie star’s career. Bruce Willis can’t be given enough credit here. He …
[9] As far as monster movies go, this is the one to beat. It’s the only film directed by the late Stan Winston, the special effects wizard who brought so many creatures and otherworldly characters to life in movies like Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and Edward Scissorhands. I always wished he’d directed another movie, because Pumpkinhead is creepy as hell, a superb dark fairy tale …
[10] Director Sydney Lumet sets the gritty streets of New York aside temporarily and gives us an emotionally stirring family drama about two parents who have to uproot their family every time the feds catch scent of their trail. If they ever get too comfortable, they run the risk of being locked away for an act of protest that accidentally ended in a fatality during …
[9] George Lucas produces and Ron Howard directs this fantasy adventure about an unlikely band of heroes who protect a prophetic baby against an evil queen who seeks to destroy them all. Willow is its producer’s baby and has a lot in common with the Star Wars movies. It’s characters are broadly drawn, the drama never scrapes below surface level, and it’s full of visual …
[10] In the not-so-distant future, a Detroit policeman is murdered by a vicious cop-killer, only to be resurrected as the ultimate cyborg law enforcer. But will RoboCop have free will, or will he be slave to the corporation that facilitated his rebirth? On one level, RoboCop is an action film sprinkled with generous amounts of extreme violence and gore. But the movie also has unexpected …
[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 …
[9] Clive Barker holds nothing sacred, least of all flesh, in exploring the fine line between love and pain in this sado-masochistic fantasy. The movie throbs with an intense, dark passion — dark enough for a woman to love the skinless man living in her attic. Clare Higgins delivers the movie’s best performance as the brooding, lust-driven Julia. Her sinister relationship with her dead ex-lover …
[9] The public will never let director Joel Schumacher live down his Batman movies, but let’s not forget that before there were nipples on the Batsuit, there was The Lost Boys. A divorced mother brings her two sons to a coastal California town to live with their grandfather and make a new life for themselves. There’s just one problem. The whole town is prey for …
[10] James Cameron accomplishes a rare feat with a sequel that doesn’t shame the original and succeeds on its own merits. Aliens is so different in tone than the original Alien, I think of it as a sequel only in name (this goes for all the Alien movies). In a smart move, Cameron decided not to compete with Ridley Scott in the areas of horror …
[10] Harrison Ford gives one of his best performances as Allie Fox, an obsessed inventor who moves his family to a Central American jungle to escape what he perceives to be the end of American civilization. Peter Weir (Witness, Dead Poets Society) directs from a screenplay by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), based on the novel by Paul Theroux. We experience the story through …
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