Kill Bill: Volume 2 first published by Movie Gazette, 26 Feb 2004 (here slightly altered) Revenge may be, as the old Klingon proverb goes, a dish best served cold, but when Quentin Tarantino is the chef, it is served very, very cool – and the result is something sweet and satisfying. Kill Bill is his…
Kill Bill: Volume 1 first published by Movie Gazette, 13 Oct 2003 With only three feature films to his name – Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997) – Quentin Tarantino has a peculiar status. On the one hand he is the most influential director of the 1990s, whose postmodern resuscitation of…
Death Proof first published by EyeforFilm, 5 September 2007 Comprising a double-feature of Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez‘s Planet Terror (as well as mock-up trailers during the intermission), Grindhouse was originally conceived as a grittily nostalgic revival of the whole ‘grindhouse’ experience – yet another groovy time-warp to add to the countless Noughties…
True Romance first published by Little White Lies, as entry 131 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Every romance has its meet-cute. In the case of Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) and Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette), the meet-cute takes place in a Detroit movie theatre, announcing to the viewer (also originally in a theatre) that Tony Scott‘s…
Synopsis: In Takashi Miike’s post-modern foray into the western genre, a gun-toting stranger inserts himself into age-old hostilities in a dust-blown town. Review: Like the ‘half-breed’ boy Heihachi (Ruka Uchida) at its core, Sukiyaki Western Django is a film of confounded and contested pedigrees, occupying the shifting generic borderlands where samurai flick meets oater and East meets West,…