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.
1980sSeptember 11, 2026
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…
2020sSeptember 11, 2026
Moonfall (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 the most…
2020sSeptember 11, 2026
The 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…
1970sSeptember 11, 2026
Zombie (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…
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
28 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…
1970sSeptember 11, 2026
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…
2000sSeptember 10, 2026
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…
1990sSeptember 10, 2026
The 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…
2000sSeptember 10, 2026
The 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…
1940sSeptember 10, 2026
The 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…
1970sSeptember 10, 2026
Jaws (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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