POMO

This sequel to Cronenberg’s The Fly, directed by the creator of its special effects, has nothing in common with the original’s intimate psychological vision. It has a banal, empty subject, no atmosphere, a few high-quality make-up effects and a more action-packed ending so you have the feeling that at least something happened in those 105 minutes.

Antonio Banderas is cut out for the role of a medieval hero, Jerry Goldsmith’s music is fantastically monumental and the individual (mainly action) scenes are also very nicely filmed and sometimes chilling with their dynamics and dark atmosphere. The scene in the caverns is flawless. But all of those nicely filmed moments are oddly patched together into a sprawling and inconsistent whole that is disconcerting. Supposedly, this is the fault of Michael Crichton, whose contract allowed him to interfere with the final form of the film. An angry John McTiernan therefore dropped out of the project before it was finished. The result is thus not McTiernan’s, but Crichton’s. And frankly, it’s not worth much. And that’s a shame, because this could have been a first-rate adventure.

A BEAUTIFUL adaptation of Bronte’s novel. Its atmosphere and the poetics of the black-and-white imagery have no equal today. Wuthering Heights is one of those cinematic classics that are a heart-warming celebration of moving pictures.

Until it gets to the overly drawn-out last half-hour, Wyatt Earp is a very decent western with everything the genre should have. Kevin Costner is a good fit for the role of Earp, and the melodramatic level of Earp’s emotional life is subtly balanced with the dramatic stories of his career as a sheriff. So, why was this film a commercial failure? Because it’s not a popcorn movie like Tombstone?

Robert Zemeckis’s directing is decent, but the screenwriting is so hackneyed and riddled with thriller clichés that it’s mind-numbing! And Silvestri’s rip-off of Herrmann’s music from Psycho is like a fist to the face! Though Silvestri and Zemeckis intended What Lies Beneath to be an homage to the beloved Hitchcock, they forgot the difference between paying tribute and cheap imitation. Shame on them.

Impotent filmmaking. Because of the naturalism of the sexual violence, Jill Rips is a disgusting and repulsive B-movie that tries to look like Seven and fails.

Watching Plan 9 from Outer Space requires a great deal of patience. I enjoyed it, but not as much I had expected. I was more bored than entertained. Either Tim Burton is too much of an idealist or I was expecting too much after see his wonderful Ed Wood. In any case, for fans of thoroughly bad films, I recommend the C-movie gem Robot Monster, which is even more naïve, sillier and mainly more entertaining.

A psychological ultra-hell made stylish through brilliant camerawork and editing. The plot of Sexy Beast is merely a pretext; the important thing is the original combination of three different moods – bohemian romance, cynical comedy and sultry crime flick – and the rising tension in the interactions between the characters, which exceeds everything seen so far. It’s a sensational audio-visual treat elevated by Ben Kingsley’s brilliant performance (Scorsese’s and Tarantino’s gangsters would cower in the corner). The other actors are also excellent. For me, Sexy Beast is a cult gangster flick with iconic dialogue and an iconic soundtrack. And it just gets better and better with each viewing.

This action flick was supposed to make two men famous. It was intended to be Chinese idol Chow Yun-fat’s big Hollywood debut and music-video director Antoine Fuqua’s first major feature film. But these big ambitions foundered on a below-average screenplay worthy of a straight-to-video B-movie starring Dolph Lundgren. The well-armed Chow is cool in his black coat and his unwilling partner, the blonde document forger Mira Sorvino, is sexy. But regardless of how spectacularly filmed The Replacement Killers is, it comes across as a bad joke because of its shallowness and the pointlessness of its content. Antoine Fuqua proved his mettle three years later with the excellent crime thriller Training Day and Chow achieved global fame not as an action hero, but as an unhappily in-love spiritual guru and kung-fu teacher in Ang Lee’s poetic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Pulp Fiction is the most distinctive signature of the most original contemporary filmmaker and it most faithfully defines his screenwriting and directorial excellence. One of the films without which there would be no FilmBooster.