Film Freak Central

Napoleon (2023)

**½/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Rupert Everett
written by David Scarpa
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw I wish Ridley Scott's Napoleon was weirder, kinkier, as perverse as it seems like Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the diminutive emperor, wants it to be. I wish it had more time for his relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), who, in this incarnation, is cast as a kind of succubus: a barren nymphomaniac who pulls up her bloomers and spreads her legs during her courtship with Napoleon and tells him if he looks at her holiest of holies, he'll never stop wanting it. It's deeply weird, is what I'm saying, and there's a version of this film that is just ninety minutes of these two actors, ready for anything, going full-tilt boogie. Maybe he puts on a dog collar, and she steps on him; then he goes out and murders a few tens of thousands of Egyptians while firing cannons at the Great Pyramids. In that Napoleon, however, we wouldn't see the million-dollar battle sequences, but instead a series of disturbing tableaux vivant of codependency and sadomasochistic sex play ending in the same title card tallying up the number of people who died (over three million) because of this creepy little freak. "Him?" we would marvel--and then consider that maybe it's only damaged men, damaged in exactly this way, who would consider the military conquest of the world a thing to be desired, possible to accomplish, and more, possible for them to accomplish. But, alas, that's not the sort of movie Ridley Scott makes.

House of Gucci (2021) + Benedetta (2021)

HOUSE OF GUCCI
***/****
starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino
screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna
directed by Ridley Scott

BENEDETTA
***½/****
starring Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by David Birke and Paul Verhoeven, based on the book by Judith C. Brown
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Ridley Scott's second based-on-a-true-story prestige period piece of 2021 after The Last Duel takes place in the I Love You to Death cinematic universe, wherein formerly dignified actors affect ridiculous Italian accents while taking bullets from hitmen hired by their wives, ex or otherwise. Just the spectacle of watching Adam Driver do a scene with Al Pacino at an Italian picnic, the two of them talking like Mario brothers while a brunette Lady Gaga croaks in an accidental Russian accent is... And the soundtrack! George Michael, Donna Summer, New Order, the Eurythmics--it's all of it like a Nagel painting come to life: gaudy affectations of glamour and art for the bawdiest appreciators of unintentional camp. Indeed, House of Gucci is prime grist for the headliner in a midnight call-along, or the feature presentation in a future episode of "MST3K"--although, at two-and-a-half hours, I worry the same jokes would keep getting recycled, most of them about the accents, a few of them about sex-pest Jared Leto's turn as Paolo Gucci, buried beneath a ton of prosthetics that make him look on the outside what he is on the inside. (Here's the punchline: Leto steals the movie.) A deadly drinking game could be devised from the times Pacino's accent slips from hilarious Italian to Al Pacino to, during a weird funeral scene, Bela Lugosi Transylvanian. There's a scene in the last half of the film where Paolo groans into an airport payphone, "I got to wash! If you could smell-a between my groins, you'd-a unnerstan!" while Aldo makes the "c'mon" expression trying to get his attention, and then later Aldo gives Paolo, his little Fredo, the "you disappointed the hell out of me" kiss of death and, again, it's... Well, it's notably, spectacularly terrible is what it is. And I liked it.

Gladiator (2000) [20th Anniversary] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Franzoni and John Logan and William Nicholson
directed by Ridley Scott

by Bill Chambers

"Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"
-Captain Clarence Oveur (Peter Graves), Airplane!

Ridley Scott's Gladiator is good now. I suppose it was always good, if money and Oscars are indicators of quality, but for me, it was a late bloomer whose virtues have seemingly become more visible since the tide of its success receded. I remember Roger Ebert's review of the film, which he called "Rocky on downers," as one I felt a kinship with. In print and on television, he was especially dismayed by the "shabby" computer-generated Colosseum. The year before, George Lucas had set The Phantom Menace against digital cityscapes, but Gladiator marked one of the first times CGI was used extensively in a non-fantastical setting. (Harping on the Colosseum is a compliment, really, as in all likelihood it means the other products of the mainframe--the flaming arrows, the crowds, the patchwork performance of Oliver Reed--didn't draw attention to themselves.) In a currently-offline article published in 2001, I wrote that "Gladiator provokes meatier discussion as the computer age's first fully dehumanized non-sci-fi film: the late Oliver Reed became a mere mediator for his technologically aided performance, the stony streets of Rome bear an anachronistic (and soulless) patina, and Maximus is the most passive bloodlust-er Hollywood has ever seen, a video game hero on the fritz." Some context: that was me trying to hex Gladiator's chances at the Academy Awards. Needless to say, it didn't work.

Alien: Covenant (2017) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper
directed by Ridley Scott

by Bryant Frazer It's rare that a perfect film is also financially lucrative. Ridley Scott's Alien is one such title--a scary movie that really cuts across demographic boundaries. Think of it as a science-fiction slasher flick or a deep-space old-dark-house thriller with a crew of likeably blue-collar mopes facing off against a shape-changing menace that's part axe murderer, part wild grizzly, and part serial rapist. It works because it's non-specific. But in the space of its 117 minutes, it finds what frightens you. Alien stands as a singular achievement. Still, because it was released in the age of the sequel, studio 20^th Century Fox eagerly founded a franchise on it, and the series immediately begin deconstructing itself. James Cameron's Aliens was downright reactionary, replacing the first film's working-class heroes with a bunch of Heinlein-esque space marines, transforming its boogeyman into an opposing army of boogeymen, and saddling Ripley with motherly duties, blithely undoing Alien's celebrated subversion of such tropes. In Alien³, the game was truly on: Director David Fincher straight-up murdered Ripley's new nuclear family before powering the film's narrative towards a climactic conflagration depicting a Christ-like sacrifice and unalloyed abortion metaphor. This was much more in keeping with the subtextually-rich original--but it was decidedly audience-unfriendly. It took another five years for Joss Whedon and Jean-Pierre Jeunet to stick a fork in the franchise; Alien: Resurrection was the first Alien movie that genuinely didn't seem to give a shit about Alien movies.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

*/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw When you call your film "Prometheus," you're borrowing centuries of critical thought, grafting yourself to the idea of the ascension of Christianity on the backs of vanquished pantheons and suggesting the mischief in stealing the light of Heaven (the better with which to build your own unholy automatons). Mary Shelley knew this when she subtitled Frankenstein "Or, the Modern Prometheus," and Ridley Scott knew this, too, when he partnered with everyone's favourite half-assed theologian/philosopher/one-eyed king Damon Lindelof to make a prequel to one of his two or three movies that are worth a damn, Alien. Not content to leave well enough alone, Scott is back with Alien: Covenant (hereafter Covenant), whose title invokes either a promise made by God as represented by Jesus's crucifixion in the Christian New Testament, or the promises God makes in the Old Testament to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David--each of which, Christians may tell you, predicts the New Covenant. The old ones were written in stone, you see, but the new one is written on your heart. Another Shelley, Percy, makes a cameo in this one as his "Ozymandias" is recited at some length, reminding mainly that it was used better, and more subtly, in "Breaking Bad". There, it was assumed the viewer knew the piece in question. The film narrates it. It's the difference between being respectful of your audience, and being a pretentious dick.

The Martian (2015)

**/****
starring Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristin Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor
screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The riposte, and it's a fair one, is: What would make you happy? And the frustrating response is, "I don't know." The problem is this (and in a movie about solving problems, it's germane to raise one): that The Martian, Ridley Scott and Drew Goddard's faithful adaptation of Andy Weir's bestseller, is essentially a bwana story in which smart and resourceful black and Chinese people band together to save a white explorer who declares himself both "colonizer" and "pirate" at various points in the movie. It's a summary of a certain kind of film, too, the space opera that used to be all the rage in the 1950s--a decade actually interested in exploration rather than defunding NASA and rabid anti-intellectualism. The only thing missing is a space chimp and a space lady with rockets in her brassiere. I confess that I probably wouldn't have even been thinking much, or perhaps as quickly, about the racial politics of this film had Matt Damon, the bwana in question, not "whitesplained" to a black producer (a female black producer) what diversity means as regards his wish-fulfillment reality series "Project Greenlight". Or if it weren't directed by Ridley Scott, whose last film, Exodus: Gods and Kings, required volumes of whitesplaining itself as to why the principals of his Middle Eastern/African tale were white.

The Counselor (2013)

½*/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw When I read The Crossing, I believed it to be the finest American novel in the Southern Gothic tradition since Faulkner rolled up Yoknapatawpha County under his arm and went home. Then I read Blood Meridian, and thought I was in the presence of maybe the most important American author since, who, Pynchon? But after that, Cormac McCarthy dried up. I didn't care for Cities on the Plain, his wrapping up of the lauded "Border Trilogy" that began with All the Pretty Horses and sandwiched The Crossing in between, and I thought No Country For Old Men was weak and obvious, lacking fire, while The Road was well and completely flaccid. Going backwards didn't help: Child of God was a fragment, Suttree had that bit with the pig but not much else, and the incest fairytale Outer Dark seemed a sketch. But then the Coens adapted No Country for Old Men as a summary critique of the key themes of McCarthy's work, and I was entranced again, or at least willing to give his stuff a shot again. It's the mark of a gifted critic, and the Coens are our most gifted literary critics, to reanimate something that's been dead for a while. So we land here, following a too-faithful screen translation of The Road and the curious, forgettable, elderly HBO flick The Sunset Limited (first written by McCarthy as a play) with the inevitability of a film, The Counselor, based on an original screenplay by McCarthy, supervised by McCarthy to the point of McCarthy giving line readings to frickin' Michael Fassbender, and promoted with McCarthy billed almost as prominently in the breathless trailer as director Ridley Scott and co-star Brad Pitt. And, yes, this film by a novelist twenty years past his prime, dabbling now in a new medium like old Michael Jordan playing baseball, stinks of an almost Greek hubris, an almost Icarean overreaching. The Counselor is uniquely awful.

Prometheus (2012)

*/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw It's time, probably long past time, to admit that Ridley Scott is nothing more or less than Tim Burton: a visual stylist at the mercy of others to offer his hatful of pretty pictures something like depth. If either one of them ever made a great film (and I'd argue that both have), thank the accident of the right source material and/or editor, not these directors, whose allegiance is to their own visual auteurism rather than any desire for a unified product. For Scott, the conversation essentially begins and ends for me with Alien, Blade Runner, and Black Hawk Down (for most, it's just the first two, with a political nod to Thelma & Louise)--genre films, all, and each about the complications of mendacity given over to lush, stylish excess: the gothic, biomechanical haunted house of Alien's Nostromo mining vehicle and its hapless band of blue-collar meatbags; the meticulously detailed Angelino diaspora of Blade Runner and its Raymond Chandler refugee; and Mark Bowden's Mogadishu, transformed in Black Hawk Down into a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Again, there's that utility. Without it, Scott's films are impenetrable monuments to style, as smooth and affectless as a perfume advertisement--and the more you watch them, the less memorable that style becomes.

Legend (1986) [Ultimate Edition] - DVD + Blu-ray Disc

Director's Cut ***/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A+
BD - Image A- Sound A- Extras A
Theatrical Cut **/****
DVD - Image B- Sound B+ Extras A+
BD - Image B- Sound A- Extras A
starring Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry, David Bennent
screenplay by William Hjortsberg
directed by Ridley Scott

by Bill Chambers The American theatrical release of Legend is more impressionistic than the Director's Cut of the film that accompanies it on DVD--because it's the hollowed-out carcass of a complete cinematic experience. It's this gorgeous, dainty thing that hints at something beyond the horizon, lacking not colour but texture, which is in abundance in Scott's latest rendition of the picture. As a child, I watched Legend over and over again, never liking it but always dazzled by it and hoping, perhaps, that repeat viewings would help me to see what isn't there. There is fire and ice yet no warmth and no chill in the U.S. Legend. (I imagine the European cut is little different at five minutes more.) Ridley Scott's exclusive-to-DVD re-edit of Legend contains approximately twenty minutes' worth of heretofore-unseen footage and restores Jerry Goldsmith's lyrical score, and with no pun intended, it's fantastic.

Robin Hood (2010)

**/****
starring Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, William Hurt, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Brian Helgeland
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw Predictably, achingly, perfectly okay, Ridley Scott into his dotage has produced a string of absolutely unsurprising, overlong, uninspiring-if-occasionally-visually-striking films, of which Robin Hood is only the latest. An attempt to "reboot" the Robin Hood legend with a "prequel" that shows how a middle-aged Robin (Russell Crowe) meets his Merry Mystery, Alaska Men, woos freshly-widowed "maid" Marion (Cate Blanchett), sort of composes the "Declaration of Independence," directly influences--it's implied--the signing of the Magna Carta (in the completion of which the film's real hero, William Marshal (William Hurt), was instrumental) not long after the events of the movie, and enters into a life of sylvan banditry at the prodding injustice of ineffectual King John (Oscar Isaac, doing his best Russell Brand). It also suggests that Marion is a Maid of Orléans figure who rides into battle alongside the menfolk to repulse an inexplicable French invasion shot in such a way as to suggest a Gallic D-Day landing (or an attack on Northern England by the New Orleans Saints)^*--marking the second time Blanchett's done this exact scene after the admittedly-worse Elizabeth: The Golden Age. All of which is portrayed in so exacting and expository a way in that inimitably stately Ridley Scott style that the picture's bumfuddling 140-minute runtime feels like a couple of torturous days spent at a Renaissance Fair. Maybe it's the complete lack of stakes that hamstrings the production--the surety that no compelling issues will be broached, despite all the posturing about Robin Hood being Thoreau over six centuries before Thoreau (or Thomas Jefferson five centuries before Jefferson) in a deeply stupid town-centre meeting that more closely resembles the Endor council in Return of the Jedi than it does the requisite stirring centrepiece monologue in this prestige epic lost without an awards season.

American Gangster (2007); I'm Not There (2007); No Country for Old Men (2007) + No Country for Old Men ['08 BD + 2-Disc Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Discs

AMERICAN GANGSTER
***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding, Jr.
screenplay by Steven Zaillian
directed by Ridley Scott

I'M NOT THERE
***½/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere
screenplay by Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman
directed by Todd Haynes

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
****/****
'08 BD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
CE - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment when an overly enthusiastic police search results in the demolition of a replica dresser commissioned by Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) for the Carolina plantation he's bought to house his extended family. In one canny instant, there's the suggestion that nothing ever changes: the things we lose in time we will always lose. The image Ridley Scott provides for us as he moves the Lucas clan into their new digs is loaded and dangerous, with a group of African-Americans walking up the lush green lawn of an antebellum plantation--usurpers of a corrupt American Dream that, American Gangster posits, is still corrupt and in essentially the same way. True, there's a cartoon bogey in a New York cop (Josh Brolin) erected as the straw man for all of New York's Finest who's profiting off French Connection junk (gasp, he shoots a dog, and probably also smokes)--but the real villainy in the picture is the idea that the path to true status and achievement in the United States is on the backs of not just others, but entire groups of others.

Body of Lies (2008)

**/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani
screenplay by William Monahan, based on the novel by David Ignatius
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw Perfectly workmanlike, unimpeachably prestige-y, achingly contemporary, and a near-complete failure as revelation, Ridley Scott's Body of Lies tells the tale of modern spook-dom complete with spy satellites, cell-phone eavesdropping, torture, and terrorists. A compelling stew, one would think, yet something that a decade ago would be seen as science-fiction and as recently as a few years ago as satire today offers no surprises--no discernible sharp edges, smooth as a river stone worn down by a few fast years of crippling cynicism. So the United States is a fingernail factory skating on the razored edge of impossible technologies and still, because of two-minutes-ago wisdom and dusty bureaucrats, unable to exterminate subjects and achieve minimal objectives in our ideological war. The film advises that we trust no one, that the issues are complex, that our enemies aren't stupid, and that there will always be a super-suave Sharif-ian Arab in pictures like this lest we forget how much we're capable of getting behind the Disneyfied Aladdin portrait of the Near East when push comes to shove. It reminds that Russell Crowe can get fat with the best of them even if, after The Insider, no one was wondering--and it reminds that Leonardo DiCaprio is pretty good at this intense young man shtick (although no one was wondering that, either). The problem with Body of Lies isn't its craft (indeed, it's one of the most handsomely-mounted, professionally-executed pictures of the year)--the problem is that it's got nothing to say in a media-rich environment awash with pundits, alive with YouTube, and actually awake for all the sleepiness in our mid-section. The irony of Body of Lies is that it's about intelligence but its own is at least a few months behind the curve.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982/2007) [Four-Disc Collector's Edition] - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The prototype for the modern science-fiction film, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, through its seemingly endless iterations, through its growing cult of personality and a production history that's become as familiar as a Herzog shooting mythology, retains its ability to astonish as--along with John Carpenter's contemporaneous The Thing--the last hurrah for the non-CGI, in-camera effects piece. Tron, The Last Starfighter, and Firefox were destined to be the rule of the day at the expense of matte painters and model-makers, here working out puzzles like how to make a futuristic, mechanized advertising blimp appear to be shooting strobes through the glassed ceiling of the Bradbury. Indeed, it's almost impossible to watch Blade Runner now without taking its technical brilliance for granted. It looks like it was made in 2007 (particularly in its newest, digitized incarnation); with its lack of the bluescreen artifacts that plague many of its contemporaries, it's easy to think of a mainframe as the movie's author.

A Good Year (2006) + Harsh Times (2006)

A GOOD YEAR
½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Albert Finney, Marion Cotillard, Freddie Highmore
screenplay by Marc Klein, based on the book by Peter Mayle
directed by Ridley Scott

HARSH TIMES
**/****
starring Christian Bale, Freddy Rodriguez, Eva Longoria, Terry Crews
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw The Fighting Temptations, The Family Man--the list of sappy redemption flicks about terrible assholes is as long and lamentable as Ridley Scott's interminable A Good Year. Masquerading as a man-opause version of Under the Tuscan Sun, it is instead an incredibly cynical play for exactly the kind of audience Scott and Russell Crowe don't reach and, apparently, shouldn't bother trying to seduce. Imagine a light, frothy romantic comedy written by Dostoevsky and directed by David Lean: every pratfall registers like a cattle stampede, every delightful romantic misunderstanding like a nuclear disarmament talk. Meanwhile, all around it, golden-drenched landscape shots of Provence play the part of the grinning idiot, dancing like crazy to distract the potentially-duped. (Scott at his best works in palettes drained of warmth and heat. Even the sunny Thelma & Louise plays like twenty miles of rough road compared to A Good Year's pretty postcards and stultifying stereotypes.) With the whole mess paying off in the most unlikely and irritating sequence of happy endings in a film not directed by Garry Marshall (or his Limey equivalent, Richard Curtis), the choices are either that you believe Scott and Crowe to have lost their minds or that A Good Year is smug and strident for the very reason that its creators are supercilious jackasses long since detached from any notion of the possible. Moreover, the picture demonstrates a marked disdain for those poor sods who aren't millionaire stockbrokers or possessed of dead uncles with a sprawling villa to will to their heirs.

Blade Runner - The Director's Cut (1982/1992) - DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
directed by Ridley Scott

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ridley Scott is quite obviously no auteur. Not notable for returning to a series of themes and tropes, he's more for gazing at a pretty set and ladling on the chiaroscuro. The man is less Orson Welles than Michael Curtiz, presiding stylishly over writers and actors and, crucially, designers, bringing them together in harmony instead of imposing some personal meaning on the whole shooting match. But just as Curtiz will be rescued from obscurity by the fluke triumph of Casablanca, Scott's Euro-trash imagery will always seem like more because of his resonant cult fave Blade Runner. This is a film that unites all manner of disparate elements to produce something greater than the sum of its parts, one that speaks to the displacement we feel in a technocratic world far more succinctly than if the filmmakers were conscious of what they were doing.

TIFF '05: All the Invisible Children

**½/****
directed by Mehdi Charef, Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee, Jordan Scott and Ridley Scott, Kátia Lund, Stefano Veruso, John Woo

by Bill Chambers Named after an initiative of the Italian Development Cooperation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs that supports Unicef and other global charities, this omnibus project assembles seven short subjects about children from a handful of world-class directors, all of whom were instructed to locate their contributions in their home and native land. Poverty seems to be the unifying theme until Jordan and Ridley Scott's vaguely autobiographical segment, which sticks out like a sore thumb but subversively suggests that if All the Invisible Children proper has any lessons to impart, they revolve around the auteur theory. Having never seen a film by Mehdi Charef or Stefano Veneruso, I don't know how closely their episodes hew to their previous work, but I can tell you that Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee, the Scotts, Kátia Lund, and John Woo tread familiar ground in a borderline egotistical fashion.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

**/****
starring Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Eva Green
screenplay by William Monahan
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The hero of Ridley Scott's film about The Crusades would rather not discuss that whole "God" thing. It's a stance that renders Kingdom of Heaven the second such impotent "prestige" picture to grace the early-summer screens after Sydney Pollack's simpering, stance-less The Interpreter, as well as another wondrously bland example of the toll that small minds and political correctness have taken on our popular culture. In The Interpreter's defense, it only slaughtered a few hundred thousand imaginary black people to get its white heroes making doe-eyes at one another--to get Kingdom of Heaven's cuties batting eyelashes, it takes tens of millions of real dead infidels. French Balian (Orlando Bloom) is a 12^th century blacksmith who has just lost his wife and child when his long lost father Godfrey (Liam Neeson) rides in with a small band of merry Crusaders to offer Balian lordship of a little town in the Middle East. Balian accepts, has run-ins with religious fanatic Templars Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) and his henchman Reynald (Brendan Gleeson), and gains the trust of leper king Baldwin IV (Edward Norton) and ideological martyr Tiberias (Jeremy Irons).

Matchstick Men (2003) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Sam Rockwell, Alison Lohman, Bruce McGill
screenplay by Nicholas Griffin & Ted Griffin, based on the novel by Eric Garcia
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The defining Nicolas Cage performance is still the one he delivered in Vampire's Kiss, an indescribably strange film that saw the actor affecting some sort of Algonquin accent and, in the picture's most memorable scene, screaming at his therapist while wearing an ill-fitting set of plastic fangs. For Ridley Scott's highly-anticipated take on the dead-on-its-feet big con formula Matchstick Men (one last score for the grizzled shyster, a young apprentice who's not what he seems, an unexpected and unwise late partner in crime, a big twist telegraphed from the first frame, and so on), Cage seems to have resurrected his perversely hammy turn in that underseen camp classic: screaming at another therapist (Bruce Altman, always good), donning another disguise with an astonishing number of distracting tics and affectations, and ultimately accepting his fate with a sort of fatigued, fatalistic resignation.

Black Hawk Down (2001) - DVD

****/**** Image A- Sound A+
starring Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Eric Bana
screenplay by Ken Nolan, based on the book by Mark Bowden
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw Black Hawk Down is a living, seething animal, full of courage and heroism, stinking of blood and gunpowder. It lacks the paternalistic moralizing of Saving Private Ryan as well as much of the poetry of The Thin Red Line, but it captures the best images of both while discarding the chaff of the former. One scene towards the end of the film, as exhausted U.S. Rangers are led to safety by a group of Somali children, is a fine example of that brute synergy. Ridley Scott's film is the only big budget spectacle film of the last several years (Pearl Harbor, The Perfect Storm, all the way back to Titanic) that actually has the nerve to honour the event it seeks to recreate. The characters aren't stock movie stereotypes--in fact, they're so minimally portrayed that the general homogeny of its soldiers in battle serves to highlight mainly a minimalist "us against them" mentality. Black Hawk Down trusts its audience; it is perhaps the first and only time that this will be said of a Jerry Bruckheimer production.

Hannibal (2001) [Special Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, Ray Liotta, Frankie R. Faison
screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
directed by Ridley Scott

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It is perhaps unfair to compare a sequel to its predecessor, especially one with as tenuous a connection to its predecessor as Hannibal has. With most of the original The Silence of the Lambs personnel having refused to sign on due to various creative differences, the sequel's total stylistic disconnection from its beloved 1991 precursor was probably inevitable. Couple that with the fact that the novel on which it draws can be charitably described as a desperate grasp for royalties and you have a no-win situation that would confound the most dedicated adaptor. Eager though he or she might be to remain faithful to the original's spirit, our hypothetical filmmakers would be forced to define something perfectly contrary to the parent film, something that would be its own picture--a rare enough commodity in the best of times.

Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner - Books

Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner
FFC rating: 10/10
by Paul M. Sammon

by Bill Chambers Ridley Scott's Blade Runner took two years to complete, while Paul M. Sammon's exhaustive document of its inception was finished over a period of one-and-a-half decades. The author admits that his book, like its subject, is "compulsively detailed." Future Noir's appendices alone--which include a thorough interview with Scott, fussy comparisons of Blade Runner's multiple video incarnations, confirmed continuity slip-ups, soundtrack information, a directory of related websites, and a full credits listing--occupy 66 pages! In fact, the only information Sammon fails to provide is his own credentials. A journeyman in the best way, he's a film journalist and documentarian who, as an inveterate producer of electronic press kits, was eyewitness to some legendary (and legendarily troubled) genre productions, such as Dune and RoboCop.