A siege traps everyone in one place and lets pressure do the work. This tag collects reviews of films and fiction built on siege structure, and what the form teaches about confinement, resources and nerve.
2020sSeptember 11, 2026
Rebel Moon (2023) rates 1 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Zack Snyder pitched this to Lucasfilm as a Star Wars film, was refused, and made it anyway with the names changed. It is Seven Samurai with the recruitment…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
[REC] (2007) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Seventy-eight minutes, one apartment building, a television reporter and a cameraman who never stops filming. The last five minutes in the penthouse are the most frightening sequence in any…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Pontypool (2008) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A radio DJ in a church basement in rural Ontario reports an outbreak he never sees, and the infection turns out to be carried by the English language. Almost…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Land of the Dead (2005) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Romero finally got a studio budget after twenty years and used it to make a film about a walled city where the rich live in a…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Dead Set (2008) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Charlie Brooker locked the Big Brother house against a zombie apocalypse, cast the real presenter as herself, shot it in the actual studio, and then refused to let…
1980sSeptember 11, 2026
Day of the Dead (1985) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Romero's budget was cut in half and he rewrote it into a chamber piece about twelve people in a bunker who hate each other. The zombies…
2010sSeptember 11, 2026
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…
1960sSeptember 11, 2026
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…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Open Range (2003) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner directed a slow, patient Western about two cattlemen who decide to kill a rancher, and then staged the best gunfight in the genre's last forty years. It…
1950sSeptember 11, 2026
Rio Bravo (1959) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Howard Hawks made it as a direct rebuttal to High Noon, which he considered un-American because the marshal asks townspeople for help. It is a hangout film with…
1950sSeptember 11, 2026
3:10 to Yuma (1957) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A rancher takes two hundred dollars to hold an outlaw in a hotel room until a train arrives, and almost the entire film is the two of…
1990sMay 16, 2026
Little's 1990 Steven Seagal thriller. Jamaican antagonist material reflects specific 1990 production conventions.
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