The Sixth Sense

I have a thing against twists for the sake of twists. There's a certain desire in creatives to surprise their audiences, to give them the unexpected, and the plot twist is an easy tool to use in such circumstances. The key to a good twist is that it needs to not only recast the movie…

Ashes and Diamonds

Poland was behind the Iron Curtain as an Eastern Bloc nation in the late 50s when Andrzej Wajda made Ashes and Diamonds. Subject to tight oversight and even censorship, Polish cinema benefited from the cultural thaw under Khrushchev after the death of Stalin which opened up Soviet art and film with greater latitude and global…

The Bourne Franchise Ranked: The Definitive Ranking

Another short franchise that deserves the definitive ranking treatment. Far from a Top Ten, so there's that. This is a franchise that was built a bit more traditionally, with hopes after every one that there could be more but without ever making the movies completely subservient to the idea. If the franchise had ended after…

Jason Bourne

#4 in my ranking of the Bourne Franchise. Paul Greengrass really thinks he's Gillo Pontecorvo and Costa-Gavras, and he let that flag fly here in Jason Bourne. This is also the first Bourne film that does not involve Tony Gilroy (who apparently delivered a subpar first draft for The Bourne Ultimatum which really angered Matt…

The Bourne Legacy

#5 in my ranking of the Bourne Franchise. So, Universal wanted the Bourne franchise to continue, but they didn't want to pay Matt Damon the kind of money he wanted and Paul Greengrass didn't want to return anyway. So, they did the next best thing and elevated Tony Gilroy, the writer of the first three…