Some stories strip everything away and ask one question: how does this person live through it? This tag collects reviews of survival stories, where character is revealed by what people do when rescue is not coming.
1980sStreetwalkin' (1985) rates 5 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…
2020sMoonfall (2022) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Roland Emmerich spent around a hundred and forty million dollars of independent money on a film where the moon is a hollow alien megastructure, and it is one of…
2020sThe Gray Man (2022) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Netflix spent around two hundred million dollars on an action film with two of the largest stars available, and produced something nobody can describe afterward. The Prague…
1970sZombie (1979) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lucio Fulci was hired to make an unauthorized sequel to Dawn of the Dead and made something older instead, closer to Caribbean voodoo horror than to Romero. It contains…
2000s[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…
2000s28 Weeks Later (2007) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The opening twelve minutes are as good as anything in the genre and the film never reaches them again. Robert Carlyle abandons his wife to save himself…
1970sJeremiah 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…
2000sInto 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…
1990sThe Postman (1997) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner turned a satirical novel about a con man into a three hour sincere epic about American institutions, and ended it with a statue of himself. It took…
2000sThe Day After Tomorrow (2004) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Roland Emmerich froze the northern hemisphere in about a week, which is roughly ten thousand times faster than any climate model permits, and produced the most…
1940sThe Pianist (2002) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Polanski survived the Krakow Ghetto as a child and spent sixty years declining to film the Holocaust before he made this. It won the Palme d'Or and three…
1970sJaws (1975) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The mechanical shark did not work, the schedule ran three times over, and the failure produced the technique. Spielberg was twenty-seven and had to build suspense out of everything…
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