True Grit (1969) Review
True Grit (1969) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Wayne finally won an Oscar for playing a fat, drunk, one-eyed marshal who shoots men in the back, and the performance works because he is willing to…
Genre: Adventure (Page 2)
ActionThe Magnificent Seven (2016) Review
The Magnificent Seven (2016) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Antoine Fuqua takes the same structure, casts it the way the American West really looked, and gives the villain a coherent economic argument. The last forty minutes…
ActionSilverado (1985) Review
Silverado (1985) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lawrence Kasdan made a Western in a decade that had stopped making them, assembled four leads before any of them were famous, and built it out of every convention…
ActionThe Magnificent Seven (1960) Review
The Magnificent Seven (1960) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai relocated to the Mexican border, shortened by an hour, and improved in one specific way. Every gunman gets an introduction that is also an…
AdventureJeremiah Johnson (1972) Review
Jeremiah Johnson (1972) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man goes into the mountains to be alone and the film spends two hours on the practical difficulty of that. Almost no dialogue, real winter, and a…
AdventureLonesome Dove (1989) Review
Lonesome Dove (1989) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Six and a half hours of television that does what almost no Western film has room for, which is to follow a cattle drive long enough that the…
AdventureO Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) Review
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The Coens claimed to be adapting the Odyssey without having read it, which is either a joke or the most useful thing anybody has said…
AdventureInto the Wild (2007) Review
Into the Wild (2007) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Sean Penn adapts Krakauer's account of Chris McCandless walking into Alaska and dying there, and the film admires him considerably more than the book does. Hal Holbrook…
AdventureIshtar (1987) Review
Ishtar (1987) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Elaine May made a screwball comedy about two men with no talent, spent fifty-one million dollars doing it in the Sahara, and the name became shorthand for disaster before…
ActionThe MCU Phase 4 and Beyond (2021-present) Review
The MCU from Phase 4 onward rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Scoring every project I have seen puts Phase 4 at an average of 4.4 and Phase 5 at 2.67. The interesting part is not the…
ActionPirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) and Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) Review
The later Pirates films rate 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. On Stranger Tides cost four hundred and ten million dollars, which made it the most expensive film ever made, and Dead Men Tell No Tales cost two…
AdventureStar Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) Review
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lucas had not directed a film in twenty-two years, owned the company outright, and answered to nobody. The result opens with a trade dispute, gives…