I have watched this more times than is defensible. A film about a computer, a requirements document and a mountain, and the machine is never once broken.
The Pyx (1973) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A Canadian film in which a woman falls from a Montreal balcony and the investigation runs backward through her last days, intercut, with Karen Black singing her own…
The New York Ripper (1982) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lucio Fulci made a giallo about a killer who murders women and quacks like a duck on the telephone. It was seized in Britain, refused certification…
Stripped to Kill (1987) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Katt Shea's first film as director, made for Concorde under a brief requiring a fixed number of dance sequences, and she used the constraint to build something…
Streetwalkin' (1985) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A Concorde Pictures production shot in New York in about three weeks, with Melissa Leo in her first lead role eight years before her career started, and a structure…
Street Girls (1975) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A father searches Eugene, Oregon for a daughter who has disappeared into the local trade, in a film co-written by Barry Levinson a decade before he directed anything,…
Sharky's Machine (1981) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Burt Reynolds directed himself in an Atlanta police thriller with a jazz score, a surveillance structure and a genuinely nasty streak, and it is the best film he…
Nighthawks (1981) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Stallone and Billy Dee Williams are New York decoy cops assigned to an international terrorist, and Rutger Hauer is so much better than the film around him that he…
Ms. 45 (1981) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Abel Ferrara made a rape-revenge film with a mute protagonist, almost no dialogue and a budget of around sixty thousand dollars, and Zoe Lund's performance is better than…
Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Diane Keaton plays a teacher of deaf children who spends her nights in bars, in a film that is genuinely good for ninety minutes and then…
Dark Blue (2002) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kurt Russell plays a third-generation LAPD officer who plants evidence as a matter of routine, set in the week before the Rodney King verdict. James Ellroy wrote the…
Avenging Angel (1985) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The sequel recast its lead, aged the character to university student, and converted a squalid character piece into a revenge picture with a real estate conspiracy. It is…
The craft notes in these reviews come from the same eye Richard Lowe brings to books. He has authored 113+ books and ghostwritten 54+ more across fiction, memoir, and nonfiction. If you want a book that respects the reader the way the best films do, start with a conversation.
