Fritz Kiersch directs James Spader, Robert Downey Jnr. and Kim Richards in this teen gang movie where a preppy rebel moves to a tough neighbourhood where the kids are felony level threatening.

Rebel Without a Cause remade with an MTV aesthetic and a severe ADHD level of distraction. Swings schizophrenically from sweetly poppy to violently razor edged. There are musical dance numbers and hardcore street crimes within a scene change of each other, Beverly Hills Cop inspired visits to country clubs and lethal warehouse rumble finales. It is fair to say you wouldn’t be surprised if Señorita Cocaine didn’t get her own Executive Producer credit. Little Robert Downey Jnr is definitely dripping in narcotics sweat and twitching like a junkie in a stand out best friend role… And yet somehow it all joyfully coalesces into a blast of Saturday night entertainment. Like The Lost Boys or Labyrinth you can approach it as a cheesy cult item but that doesn’t really hide the fact that Spader is captivatingly awesome in this early lead role; all aloof but sincere. Genuinely surprised this doesn’t have a larger rep among hipster retro heads and fans of movies where taxi driver sad dad’s turn out to be able take three street punks on bare knuckled. Awesome New Wave soundtrack too!

8

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Steven Spielberg directs Eric Bana, Daniel Craig and Mathieu Amalric in this true story thriller about the Mossad agents who retired from the Israel security service to hunt down the masterminds of Munich Olympic murders and execute them.

Made in the shadow of 9/11, Spielberg delivers his most mature and disturbing storytelling within the first 90 minutes. Surveillance, assassinations, safe houses. We are immersed in the paranoia, ethics and practicalities of being a globe trotting death squad. Like a lot of the ageing blockbuster genius’ projects in this period he rushed through the shoot and the edit. An academy award qualifying date needed to be hit, this was the go project out a dozen others in development potentials he could of received the greenlight for. Shot for shot you’d never tell, the compositions are flawless, but as a narrative feature the final act falls apart. We watch a sturdy Bana psychologically disintergrate on a dime, a man warped by his own shadow life and methods (with an obvious debt to Coppola’s The Conversation). We are lost in a malaise of an incomplete mission and a man left without a country. We flashback to the instigating terrorist incident during sex scenes. Spielberg shouldn’t be allowed near fucking, as this is possibly one of the worst sex scenes in mainstream cinema. He sees making love as a dark, transactional, lethal experience. He actively avoided it for the first thirty years of his career for good reason. Here, and in Minority Report, screwing feels like the equivalent of sticking your genitals in a bear trap. He just doesn’t seem to understand intimacy or passion. Nudity has a cold, vulnerable, sweaty shiver in Steven’s vision of the world. He’s on surer ground with the tense set pieces, the looping discussions on the ethics of geopolitical revenge and the mysterious French intelligence traders who take his group of orphaned killers under their untrustworthy wing. A few more months in the editing room and Munich might shaken off its later weird indulgences and found perfection. Frustrating that he was churning them out with such blunt ferocity during this decade instead of taking a breath and sculpting a bit of resolution and prudence into his projects. This could have been a definitive cinematic heat check on the concerns of early 21st century. Instead it now plays out like a mere retro stepping stone on a game Craig’s path to 007 stardom.

7

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Stanley Kubrick directs Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor in this noir heist movie where a group of losers execute a perfectly planned race track robbery… but you can’t plan for the cruel vagaries of chance.

Kubrick’s breakthrough movie still excels. A masterpiece of the crime genre, every scene is a hard boiled treat. This evolved all the hoary old tropes of the noir genre and established all the tricks that future caper and action movies would embrace. Tarantino owes it a massive debt. Not just for the obvious non-linear structure influence but in how Kubrick treats the types and traits. He knows we have seen a hundred B pictures like this before and builds on our pre-existing canon. He knows we want to see weedy rat Elisha Cook sour the plan, or Marie Windsor’s malevolent shrew wife double cross the crew. She’s excellent here, by the way. We’re hardwired to expect it from them… their casting is shorthand to lifetimes and personalities we have long witnessed with every trip to the cinema. We meet a chess loving wrestler and somehow are savvy to his entire backstory despite only witnessing his procedural recruitment and part in the heist. Kubrick’s The Killing feels like the first film that knows you know how it will play out and pessimistically winks at you as code and fate and cliche trap its players with cruel indifference. It is in this respect what QT would call one his “movie movies”. The kinda cinema his fictional characters from slightly more realistic confections might go watch in their down time. Special credit goes to Jim Thompson’s stone cold dialogue and The Wild Bunch’s Lucien Ballard’s crisp, oppressive cinematography.

10

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Barry Sonnenfeld directs Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia and Christina Ricci in this dark comedy sequel where the creepy and the kooky family welcome a new babysitter who has murderous intentions towards Uncle Fester.

The first act is such a hilarious onslaught of jokes that this sequel threatens to outpace and outclass the already beloved first film. It does (unfortunately) settle down once the two main plots kick in but everything that follows is still very satisfyingly on point.

7

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Jonathan Lynn directs Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn and Lesley Ann Warren in this cult ensemble based on the murder mystery board game.

The litany of beloved intellectual properties Hollywood stripmines and reboots and yet the one from my childhood, desperate for a second chance at glory, somehow hasn’t been touched. Clue is a one location comedy with a lot of running around and barely any jokes. It is so caught up in it concept that it completely overlooks this indispensable ingredient. Listen… I love that the glorious Tim Curry is centre stage. I love the fact that five minutes from the end the brilliant Madeline Kahn tries to improvise something funny for her character to say and it stands out like a sore thumb. I love Coleen Camp in a French Maid outfit. A true cult item in that my baffled generation has looked so hard into it for laughs that we’ve kind of turned all the exposition, shrieking and repetition into its own comedy version of alchemy. It is the Magic Eye painting of humour, stare at it long enough and you’ll see hilarity. Released in theatres originally with three different ending, you’d have to hope you at least bought a ticket for the C finale that has one of the greatest closing lines to any movie ever.

5

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Thomas Vinterberg directs Ulrich Thomsen, Thomas Bo Larsen and Trine Dyrholm in this Danish black comedy where a son makes shocking speech at a family dinner and everyone just tries to carry on celebrating.

So… I was devouring Sight & Sounds in my college library in the late 1990s. Trying to mature my tastes from John Woo and John Landis. I’d wager this is the first foreign (and experimental) film that actually clicked with me on the big screen. I was fully engrossed by the disturbing satire, the ugly performances from the spoilt family members and the warmer background turns from the staff. The digital supernatural elements have aged well. There’s some fine in-camera shocks. Some strong bastard laughs too. Sneaky tender moments amid all this nihilism and class scabrousness. I care less and less about the Dogme fimmaking methods the further away we get from their brief moment in the sun. The “vow of chastity” never meant all that much to me. Instead of democratising cinema, pretty much every release that followed in Festen’s wake was found wanting. There are times when the handheld, medium definition filmmaking doesn’t help the escalating drama even here. For that reason I loved Vinterberg’s breakthrough just a little less on this rewatch. But back in the day, this was a landmark in the evolution of my movie tastes. I’ll always be a mainstream guy, but this opened up arthouse for me, made it accessible.

9

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Hong Sang-soo directs Kim Sang-kyung, Uhm Ji-won and Lee Ki-woo in this Korean arthouse drama where a young man watches a film about a suicide pact at a cinema, only to then spy the lead actress he is enamoured with after leaving the screening.

Two parallel stories about feckless men. Pleasurable only when ‘life’ imitates art and shots and locations and awkward emotions are recreated between the actress and her rather pitiful stalker. Some nicely mundane sex scenes stop this from being a complete trudge.

4

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Ed Zwick directs Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman and Andre Braugher in this Civil War drama following the formation of first fully black company of volunteer soldiers.

Morgan Freeman and Denzel delivering exactly the acting quality and star power you now expect from them near the start of their respective careers. Equal screentime is given to the white officers, though theirs isn’t the story you care about. Matthew Broderick is de facto top billed, and while his character would be callow and inexperienced in reality, even then he doesn’t seem like the right actor for this particular job. Even if the slightly meatier John Cusack or James Spader were cast, you do feel thirty years down the line the narrative focus would now be squarely on the enlisted grunts. The blistering grand finale, a heroic suicide raid on a fort, echoes Kurosawa’s work in colour in both its beauty and tragic ferocity. James Horner’s elegiac score ekes itself into your soul for days after. This is a wonderful piece of mainstream filmmaking, almost timeless… I wonder if the core audience for Civil War cinema doesn’t favour the wrong side of history, however? Just a thought…

8

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Satoshi Kon directs Megumi Hayashibara, Tōru Emori and Katsunosuke Hori in this anime sci-fi where scientists try to solve the mystery of a stolen dream decoding technology.

Beautiful dreamer – manga edition! There’s a lot of ideas and imagery here and not all of it sticks. I’m not sure whether it is even supposed to. Noteworthy as there clearly are a few plot concepts and visual echoes that found themselves into Inception only a few years later. The final near-apocalyptic overspill of fantasy into reality seems to predict social media’s persuasive influence on everyday life and interaction at least five years ahead of time. This is a prescient little trip but a bit too unwieldy to fully enjoy as much more than a colourful academic exercise.

7

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

The Dardenne Brothers direct Adèle Haenel, Jérémie Renier and Louka Minnella in this kitchen sink mystery from Belgium.

Works both as a low key amateur detective thriller and as a convincing week in the life of a modern GP. Adèle Haenel sells the pressures and rewards of working in her lower income community with a believable resilience. You share her quiet tenacity to get to the truth and alleviate some unwarranted guilt over an unclaimed young girl’s death. The crime aspects that unfold naturally are pretty compelling.

8

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/