The Mercenary

Jan 21, 2022 — This week: Sundance at thirty and Ways of Seeing at fifty, plus the Márta Mészáros and Bill Morrison retrospectives and a new Cinema Scope.

May 24, 2017 — “Sofia Coppola delivers a very enjoyable southern melodrama, the tale of a handsome, badly wounded Union soldier in enemy terrain during the American civil war who throws himself on the mercy of a ladies’ seminary—of all the outrageous things.” The...

Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...

Mar 23, 2010 — If we adapt the language of horse breeders to the genealogy of films, we might write Yojimbo, by Shane out of Scarface.But while this odd coupling does suggest the most obvious hereditary traits of Akira Kurosawa’s black comedy, it fails...

Apr 7, 2025 — He played Iceman, Jim Morrison, Doc Holliday, and even Batman as no one else would or could have.

Nov 20, 2023 — This month brings new books on Godard and Bergman, novelists moonlighting as film critics, and biographies of Lena Horne and Elizabeth Taylor.

Apr 1, 2018 — Empire has been rolling out interviews from its “Spielberg Takeover” issue, the one with five different covers, including a podcast (102’01”) that’s naturally not part of the print version, in which contributors talk with Steven Spielberg himself and with Simon...

The dynamic, Tokyo-born star was convincing whether playing a mercenary lone wolf or a heartsick love interest, a hero or a villain, in a sleek suit or samurai robes, and just as comfortable blending in to an ensemble as commanding...

Feb 21, 2024 — Combining the influence of the wuxia genre, the Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking of the 1980s, and loony comic-book futurism, these two ass-kicking fantasias are dazzling showcases of female physicality.

Aug 13, 2007 — Samuel Fuller knew how to handle a gun from his army days, and this experience colored all of his filmmaking, which he began at the age of thirty-six.