Word: film
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...long tracking shot at the start of the film, a feral cat prowls this wasteland until it is felled by a slow-motion arrow. The silent, heavily bearded archer moves on into a shack, where a man has hanged himself. The archer notices the dead man's boots and appropriates them. He cooks himself a meal - fillet of feline - and feeds a morsel of it to a stray rat. Back on the road, he is set upon by four highwaymen. Out comes his sword, and in an instant, they are decapitated, eviscerated, kaput. Later he sees another gang abusing...
Movies have envisioned the post-apocalypse so often, from the Mad Max films to the current Daybreakers (directed by another set of twins, Peter and Michael Spierig) and The Road, that by now the future can seem passé. But the Detroit-born Hughes brothers have the bona fides to put dreadful war zones on the screen. When they were just 20, they made Menace II Society, a scalding view of gang-plagued Los Angeles. Their next film, Dead Presidents, depicted the scars of Vietnam on a returning vet. After the documentary American Pimp, they sent Johnny Depp in pursuit...
...Guys and Dolls gig should have been Simmons' passport to full American stardom. Instead, it signaled her passage into two kinds of films: small dramas, like Hilda Crane, Home Before Dark and All the Way Home, where her character was the focus; and splashy epics that concentrated on the men. She dallied with Newman in Until They Sail, supported Peck as he made his way across The Big Country and in Spartacus was the slave who is bought by Olivier but pines for Douglas. There was some meat for her to gnaw on there, and in another 1960 film, Elmer...
...Elmer Gantry she had fallen in love with the film's writer-director, Richard Brooks, whom she married after divorcing Granger. She took a couple years off when they had a daughter, Kate (she and Granger had a son, Tracy - both children named in honor of Simmons' friends Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn); and when she was ready to return to films, her moment had passed. Her enduring glamour, and the tang she put into every line of dialogue, would have made her a welcome presence in sophisticated comedies, but nobody was writing them. Not yet 35, she had become...
...final decade she did voice work (for the English-language version of Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle), and just last year she starred as the matriarch of a troubled family in the film Shadows in the Sun, back in her native U.K. In its modest way, this marked the return of Jean Simmons, a prodigious daughter. She had beguiled the British movie world as a teen, rose to one of the higher Hollywood hills in her 20s, then had to settle for being a working actress - still very pretty, but not quite so proud...