Five friends, in one log house, surrounded by numerous flesh-eating neighbors. Sound familiar? It should, seeing how only fourteen years separate this from its predecessor. Not since Gus Van Sant plunged a knife in Psycho have we witnessed such an unnecessary remake. Had Quentin Tarantino upped the number of “Hatefuls” …
Robert Rodriguez's big-budget Hollywood followup to his teensy-tiny El Mariachi: a faked folk tale, with a bubbling-over level of mirth, to do with an angelic avenger (the preening, posturing Antonio Banderas) who lugs around a private arsenal inside a guitar case. In spite of the newfound gloss, it still seems …
A terrible title, although as such an accurate forecast of the movie in its entirety: arch, pretentious, mystical-magical malarkey ("You are seriously underestimating the power of the forces aligned against us") in which an escaped convict chases his lost loot and his lost lady around the city where, as we …
Quentin Tarantino fails to do for slave owners what he did for Nazis in this, his long-awaited western (southern?) follow-up to the epic war comedy Inglourious Basterds. Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz returns to the Tarantino fold as Dr. King, a German dentist-cum-bounty hunter hot on the trail of a pair of …
Four directors. Four cinematographers. Four editors. And four separate stories, spun out consecutively on New Year's Eve in the Hotel Mon Signor, threaded together with the twitchily inventive comic performance of Tim Roth as the gung-ho new bellhop. His is as much a full-body job as the bellboy of Jerry …
An early screenplay of Quentin Tarantino's, disinterred and refurbished for his friend and colleague Robert Rodriguez to direct, and for himself to act in (amateurishly, as always, but with thoroughly aroused senses of fun and enthusiasm). The pre-credits scene exhibits some genuine movie sense. An extended bit of fat-chewing between …
A portrait of film composer Ennio Morricone, featuring never-before-seen archival footage and interviews with filmmakers and musicians including Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Quentin Tarantino, and Clint Eastwood.
Minor mishap from the maker of Swingers. Doug Liman's underfunded and overrated first film at least had a pretense of social observation within a restricted radius of reality, though even there he showed signs of excessive awareness of the audience and his effect on it. Observation tended to be outbalanced …
Julia Sweeney always seemed one of the more human and likable of the Saturday Night Live alums. The filmed record of her one-woman stage show, detailing her brother's and her own concurrent bouts with cancer, makes her seem more of each. Although she is also credited as director, it does …
It sounded like a fun idea at first. Two movies in one, a prepackaged double feature, in emulation of, or tribute to, the Golden Age exploitation films of the Sixties and Seventies, the last of the B-pictures, the Joe Bob Briggs drive-in movies, the 42nd Street grindhouse fare. Planet Terror …
There was a time in the mid-’90s when it seemed like every other indie release owed a debt of originality to Quentin Tarantino. Hell, he produced half of them! The studio press release for Habit, the latest streetwise and cinema foolish grimefest starring Bella Thorne, pays its dues in the …
Quentin Tarantino's restaging of the Civil War in a Wyoming bar owes more to Agatha Christie than it does John Ford’s Stagecoach. What was it about this cramped, underdeveloped parlor drama – the majority of which takes place on one set – that caused Tarantino to think 70mm? The frigid …
Quentin Tarantino's restaging of the Civil War in a Wyoming bar owes more to Agatha Christie than it does John Ford’s Stagecoach. What was it about this cramped, underdeveloped parlor drama – the majority of which takes place on one set – that caused Tarantino to think 70mm? The frigid …
Writer and director and co-star Larry Bishop officiates a shotgun marriage of the biker film and the spaghetti Western: a pig-in-shit frolic. Executive-produced by Quentin Tarantino, Keeper of Low Standards. With Michael Madsen, Eric Balfour, Vinnie Jones, Dennis Hopper, and David Carradine.
Sophomoric gore, "presented" by Quentin Tarantino but directed by Eli Roth. Youthful backpackers interrupt their tour of Amsterdam (a cannabis cafe, a disco, the red-light district, no time for Anne Frank House) in order to pursue the promise of beautiful and easy girls in Slovakia, where indeed a couple of …