Michael Dare

With equal touches of Kafka, Genet, and Beckett, director Bertrand Tavernier’s brilliant adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1964 pulp paperback Pop. 1280 takes place in an ethical No Man’s Land. Thompson novels are all harrowing studies in amoralit…

The Beatles had already done “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” Paul Simon had already sung “Mother and Child Reunion,” The Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane had both recorded in Kingston, but it was The Harder They Come that really put reggae on the

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Abeautiful woman is mysteriously beating the bejesus out of a drunk when he suddenly pulls at her hair and it comes off. The now totally bald woman continues smacking him around with her shoe until he falls to the ground. Soon, she stops hitting him …

Every once in a while some outlaw comes along to prove that movies can be something else—not just a weary procession of prepackaged product, but a spectacular mode of personal expression. Steven Soderbergh is the prodigy of 1989 who came up with se…

By 1970, the sixties may have been over, but the youth of America was still riding the crest of the Woodstock Festival into the new decade. 1969 gave us Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, Charles Manson directing his followers to commit the Tate-LaB…

The Blob on laserdisc? Oh, come on. Isn’t it just a ‘50s, black and white, small screen, cheesy horror flick? Wrong. If you only saw The Blob twenty years ago on your parents’ old Zenith, you’re in for a surprise. The Blob is widescreen, The

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