Othello

The band Queen playing in the background tells you everything you need to know about this movie. Highlander is the cinematic equivalent of 80s stadium rock, where monumentality is the alpha and effect is the omega. Almost all of the scenes here are subservient to that mindset and therefore for the most part make no sense, are ridiculously bloated, but impossible to take your eyes off of. Mulcahy's visual creativity here is incredible; indeed, some of the special effects and camerawork in Highlander were even patented. The cinematographer probably only took the steadycam off when he went to bed at night, yet he couldn't be allowed much in the way of freedom of movement due to the harsh close-up lighting of so many of the scenes. Mulcahy's magnum opus deceives you from the beginning with its focus and presentation of cinematic mythology, which creates the illusion of an elaborate inner world. But the second half thankfully makes clear why it was filmed in the first place – so a sleazy biker with a folding sword and a neck sewn up with safety pins can roam New York City while the hero sits in an abandoned bar with such harsh light coming through the blinds that there must have been at minimum a nuclear explosion outside. After that, the most surprising thing about the defining cult film of the 80s was how much of a showcase camp it was. With a group of people with beers in hand, you're in for a truly amazingly awful experience, which still doesn’t stop you from genuinely enjoying the film. Every, truly every scene contains some element that has you out of your seat laughing at it. Good-naturedly and enthusiastically. Everyone gets to pick their favorite. My favorite is unquestionably the one where one of the characters invites the protagonist home, tells him to tend bar for the time being, and he expertly opens a bottle of 1783 Hennessy for her. Lmao.

If Brandon is picking up where his father left off, he's taking a lot of detours through a young Cosmatos. That in itself can easily devolve into Mannerist irritating tedium, and if you get a bad night's sleep you might find the whole thing transparent show, because there's nothing underneath the entire story. For my part, though, it's a consistently and meticulously crafted genre film that at times commendably tries to pull us out of our comfort zone. What's more, the film feels like it has the same pulse throughout: slow, methodical, not picking up the pace even in its most suspenseful moments. Andrea Riseborough has definitively turned into an actress who makes a shot breathtaking just by being in it, and Jennifer Jason Leigh is the best aging acting ace of our time.

Fantastically familiar characters of resigned barflies reigned over by "that guy" Mark Boone Jr. A small-town tale where everyone knows each other and helps each other out in difficult situations, yet while everyone has given the protagonist a hand at some point, he's never done the same because he’s never had the chance. When we watch a static, life-ruined old alcoholic in one overlong shot at the beginning of the film, we wonder how he got into this dismal state. And in the end we discover we have been watching his story. I wouldn't look for much comedy here, in fact it only appears in two running jokes about a boy unsuccessfully trying to buy ice cream and the protagonist constantly losing a line of coke. Chloë, as always, dominates every scene she's in. The femme fatale of seedy America.

Actually, for its time, this is a pretty iconic example of European art for the wider public. A slow-burning story with two beleaguered outsiders whose derailment creates odd situations that allow the director and cinematographer to show off just how much they actually have up their sleeve. You can hate it just as much as you can let it get to you, because the script is infested with all sorts of crutches to motivate the story to keep going (like the protagonist's blind friend wanting to hug her at the one single moment when she wants to be alone, so she pushes him away and he immediately goes off to eat a light bulb. Eating a light bulb?! Yes, eating a light bulb.), but at the same time the overgrown children in the lead roles are terribly cute in some ways (like Franka Potente walking around like her water broke), and this managed to make a field tracheotomy, for example, the most romantic scene of the year. Yuck. Tykwer and Griebe were a duo who could mash any scripted wildness into a breathtaking visual spectacle, and it's no wonder foreign money reached for them. That the latter also anchored the provincial spectacle 25 km/h is a sad testament to the current level of the German film mainstream. Incidentally, the director's trademark, namely his demonstration of the butterfly effect and the uncontrollable interconnectedness of things, appears here as well.

I had hoped to be more forgiving when Pierce ditched the slapstick, that crunchy girl at the end is pretty cool, and crawling through underground tunnels with a gun always gives me flashbacks to the Vietcong. But it's really not worth it. The film spends most of its time trying to build some sort of rapport between the characters, revealing what terrible dead wood everyone involved is in terms of acting. Plus, a third of the dialogue is about food, because people probably don't have any other topics these days. The film could have ended about halfway through if the protagonist hadn't started babbling complete nonsense and instead just mentioned the neighbors' missing child. It feels artificial because the medium close-ups and close-ups have an exaggerated depth of field that pulls the characters out of their surroundings, and if I'm trying to create the illusion of menace coming from the forest, it’s simply not going to work unless I can shoot the forest in such a way that it doesn't feel like an city park.

I think it's just a phase a lot of young filmmakers are going through. I mean, the need to tell the story of a few characters brought together by an unbelievable coincidence to demonstrate our inability to control unfathomable destiny and ironically accept our position in the universe's ineffable plan. Or something like that; it’s just not a theme I care for. Winter Sleepers at least enriches it with the motif of transferred guilt, which is quite an interesting theory, but still rationalization to the point of misery. It's no wonder the film has to chew its way through the moronic character of Marco, who seems to have fallen out of some 80s slasher movie where he’d be playing the role of a high school football player. The cinematography, however, is once again magnificent.

Another inspection of an inhospitable German apartment full of frustrations, complexes, redolent secrets, and strange artifacts. I've been stumbling across them more and more lately, and they've become my favorite stage for all those bleak tales of unfulfilled despair, see The Death King, The Golden Glove, or Possession. But maybe that's why I don't find much unique about Deadly Maria. It's got great cinematography, a good sense of humor, lots of nice details, but it flails around its main theme like a kid in the mud. I was interested to see how Tykwer would carry over many of the formal and musical devices from his debut into Run Lola Run.

Terrible actors, crappy script, catastrophic sets, idiotic action, incredibly goofy editing... it's everything I expect from a Carpenter action movie. And from a director who made a name for himself partly by making action movies, despite never knowing how to shoot an action movie. In a way, Ghosts of Mars is a bit of a retread of both his Escape franchise (it was also originally intended to be the third installment of The Tales of Snake Plisskin, which was rewritten after the disastrous Escape from L.A.) and Assault on Precinct 13 taken to the extreme. I mean, B-grade like all get-out, a label everyone proudly swears by today, but back then you’d be very dignified and affronted.

Man, that Carpenter must have had some anger issues back then to barf up this unprecedented butchery where James Woods slaps women, beats a priest with a phone, and when he gets around to a vampire he shoots a full clip into his face from two inches away for absolutely no reason. Me gusta! That was also the year that saw another unscrupulous vampire hunter burst into the cinematic ether, namely Blade. Couldn't have been a worse year for them toothy predators.

Up until now, you could detect virtually no nineties influence in Carpenter's nineties flicks. In Escape from L.A., however, they finally landed with a giant blowjob. It's not just the obscene digital special effects that will surely make some scenes, in my opinion, the cornerstone of a future as-yet non-existent field of artistic study, but also the grey empty corridors of the military complexes, the baggy jumpsuits, the exploitation of urban subcultures, and the hedonistic genre self-consciousness. It's exactly like buying a kid a bunch of Legos from different sets and letting him assemble them as he sees fit, without any limits of reality. Stupid? Yep. Ugly-looking? Sure. Fun? Yeah, but honestly, it must have looked better on paper. Carpenter can't do big budget.