Exorcist II: The Heretic: A Second Look

There really is an advantage to watching all of the works of an individual filmmaker from beginning to end, and it's because it gives the viewer greater context for the types of stories and how the stories are told from one film to the next. Specific decisions and directions become more purposeful and explainable. However,…

Advertisement

Zardoz

The drugs have kicked in. Zardoz seems to be something of a poster-child for the hedonistic, drug-fueled, portentous, and overstuffed version of pre-Star Wars 70s science fiction, and I don't hate it. After the success of Deliverance, that went so far as to get a Best Picture nomination from the Oscars, Boorman took his cache…

Deliverance

If you've ever wanted to make a movie where a handful of guys wander around the woods for most of the runtime, I'm not sure you could find a better model than John Boorman's Deliverance, based on the book and script by James Dickey. Apparently Sam Peckinpah was interested in adapting the book at the…

Leo the Last

Yeah...no. Leo the Last is part of this subgenre of films that heavily uses metaphor and symbolism to try and explain, well, everything. Darren Aronofsky's mother! is a more modern example, and Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hotel is another. Considering the presence of Marcello Mastroianni, regular star of Federico Fellini's films, I'd say that this is…

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

#2 in my ranking of Ralph Bakshi's filmography. I hadn't so much as given upon Ralph Bakshi's career as lost as I had considered him a man so far out of his depth in the feature film world that I regretted taking on the task of watching his films. It got to the point where…