Showgirls (1995) Review
Read as a Verhoeven satire of the American Dream, the film makes sense. The 7 accounts honestly for execution problems that remain even when the satirical reading lands.
Filming Location: Los Angeles (Page 10)
CaliforniaVice Squad (1982) – Review
Wings Hauser's Ramrod is one of genre cinema's genuinely frightening villains, casual, flat, and relentless across a single Hollywood night. That's not a bad place for a genre film to land, it means the ambition outpaced the execution in specific,…
CaliforniaHardcore (1979) – Review
Paul Schrader grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's a hard film to watch, not because of what it shows, which is less explicit than its reputation suggests, but because of what it understands about…
CaliforniaMinority Report (2002) Review
Minority Report is a Spielberg film arguing against surveillance and predictive control while being too Spielberg to commit fully to the darkness its premise requires. Dick's source material was about the arbitrary nature of certainty, and Spielberg captures that element…
ArizonaStar Trek: First Contact (1996) Review
First Contact is the best Star Trek film after Wrath of Khan, and that's a significant statement given how many entries the franchise has produced. What separates it from the rest is a structural decision that most franchise filmmaking refuses…
CaliforniaBlade Runner 2049 (2017) Review
Blade Runner 2049 is visually extraordinary and narratively inert. Denis Villeneuve and Roger Deakins built some of the most stunning images in recent science fiction cinema, the orange desolation of post-collapse Las Vegas, the grey protein farms extending to the…
CaliforniaThe Terminator (1984) Review
The original Terminator is a good film that time has treated unevenly. The effects that were groundbreaking in 1984 show their age in ways that occasional.
CaliforniaBattlefield Earth (2000) Review
Battlefield Earth is the most comprehensively failed film in science fiction history. This isn't hyperbole or enthusiasm for the negative, it's an honest.
CaliforniaBlade Runner (1982) Review
The theatrical cut of Blade Runner, with Deckard's voiceover narration intact, is the correct version of this film. That position is unfashionable.
CaliforniaInterstellar (2014) Review
Interstellar is a bad film that has convinced a large number of people it's a profound one. The misdirection is accomplished through scale: everything is so large, so loud, so visually ambitious, so heavily scored that the emptiness at the…
CaliforniaThe Running Man (1987) Review
The Running Man is a better idea than film. The concept, a death sport television show operating as the primary mechanism of social control in a dystopia.
CaliforniaWestworld (1973) Review
Westworld is great and deserves considerably better than its current reputation as merely the prototype for the HBO series. Michael Crichton's original concept is tighter, scarier, and structurally cleaner than anything the television adaptation produced in its first two seasons.