Movieline Online

There are plenty of bad movies out there.  But  Southland Tales  is a truly WTF viewing experience so incomprehensibly convoluted you're not quite sure what to think.  Director Richard Kelly's debut feature,  Donnie Darko  (2001) made him the darling of the indie circuit, gathering a cult of likeminded Lynchian followers who adored the film's esoteric aesthetic involving time-travel, teen angst and the apocalypse.  But it was six years before he got another shot to prove his first success was no fluke.  Unfortunately, it turns out, it was.  Ostensibly a black comedy skewering the concepts of celebrity, politics and terrorism,  Southland Tales  features one of those IMDB cast lists that defies all probability, including Dwayne Johnson, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Geller and a handful of second tier SNL comedians.  There's a plot involving kidnapping, political subterfuge, porn stars an...

While Akira Kurosawa may be the only Japanese director with much name recognition in the U.S., Shoehei Imamura earned his share of international praise by winning the Palme d'Or at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival with  The Ballad of Narayama , an earthy slice-of-life period piece that detailed the lives of villagers eking out a meager physical and spiritual existence in an isolated mountain valley.     But Imamura was no one trick pony.  After working under the Japanese studio system throughout the '50 and '60s, he staged a comeback in the '80s with more creative control that produced a string of notable films, including another Palme d'Or winner,  The Eel , in 1997. While the latter isn't part of Arrow Video's new Blu-ray box set,  Survivor Ballads:  Three Films by Shohei Imamura , it still delivers a trio of charming, poetic, insightful, funny and sobering stories set against a wide background of Japan's complicated cultural history. ...

At the time of release,  Versus  (2000) felt like the hyperkinetic homemade culmination of Japanese samurai films, American horror, and ridiculous action tropes drenched in buckets of gore.  And that's exactly what it was.  Only time - and cinema in general - has caught up to director Ryuhei Kitamura's over-the-top antics, making his cult classic debut seem less like a feature-length trailer and more like de rigueur filmmaking in the 2K era. Escaped prisoner KSC2-303 (Kitarmura's film dispenses with character names entirely) runs afoul of a gang of hired yakuza thugs who, along with a kidnapped girl, await the arrival of their boss.  However, their meeting place happens to be in The Forest of Resurrection, and once the bodies start piling up they don't stay dead long.  Fighting their way through zombies, bullets and blades, our semi-heroic boy and girl duo are unknowingly headed for a rendezvous with destiny, doomed to replay a bloody co...

Slightly late to the genre party, director William Lustig's  Vigilante  (1982) followed the urban crime-cum-revenge fantasy precedent set by  Death Wish  all the way back in 1974.  And while the expiration date on this sort of material was closing in, Lustig's film looks  better  and tries  harder  than most of its cinematic inspirations, lifting the style and attitude of Italian  poliziotteschi  from the '70s to creative a fast moving piece of exploitation propaganda. Eddie Marino (Robert Forster) is a law-abiding, blue-collar family man who reaches his breaking point after his wife is attacked and son brutally murdered by a street gang.  When the judge suspends the perpetrator's sentence, Eddie  himself  is sent to prison for contempt of court, surviving with the help of a sympathetic experienced con (Woody Strode).  But upon release, Eddie joins up with a neighborhood vigilante squad led by his ...