Cinema Basement

An editorial by Brooks Rich 200 posts. Wow. We made it. For the 200th post I want to do something I've had in the back of my head since the blog was started. I want to look at the visual medium of black and white film. Some of the most beautiful films in history are in black and white and I am going to give my opinion on the five most gorgeous. Keep in mind I am not ranking these by content but by their looks, so don't be mad when Casablanca isn't on here. It started as ten but I was repeating myself, especially when it came to the film noirs and sweeping epics. There will be a second list ranking the most visually stunning modern black and white films, as that's a s eparate category. It's tough to rank them against the early black and white films. 5. Seven Samurai Kurosawa's sweeping epic starts our list at number five. This film is huge and Kurosawa's stunning black and white cinematography lends to that. Not only are the location...

A review by Forrest Humphrey  We've gotten a surprising amount of good horror in the last handful of years, and since Im certain someone else will talk about “It Chapter 1” I'm going to talk about what I feel is a strong runner up, 2014's “It Follows”.  The premise and story here is incredibly simple. A high school student named Jay is going about her usual routine when one night she decides to sleep with her new boyfriend Hugh, only the intimacy ends with him knocking her out with a rag soaked in chloroform. She wakes up tied to a chair, where Hugh informs her that, having slept with her, he has passed a mysterious monster on to her. “It” will always appear as a person in white, it will always follow her, and if it catches her, it will kill her.  From there the film shows Jay and her friends attempts to escape the creature or get rid of it as her life becomes increasingly worse due to the danger. Again, a simple premise, but executed to perfection. Since we, ...

A review by Brooks Rich Oh God. Oh my dear God .... is this film bad. I've seen a lot of bad horror films released in January. But this film goes above and beyond. This might be the most bafflingly incompetent third act I have ever seen in a film. It's truly remarkable. This film just kind of gives up. Thanks for coming, that's it, make your way to the exits. It's sort of remarkable. Let’s look at why,. The Turning is a loose adaptation of Henry James 1898 masterpiece The Turn of the Screw. A young woman named Kate, played by Mackenzie Davis, doing what she can with the script she's given, is hired to become the live-in nanny and tutor of a young girl named Flora, played by  The Florida Project 's Brooklyn Price, (who is perfectly fine in this film), at a large gothic estate. Things seem to be going well until the arrival of Flora's older brother Miles, played by Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard. I'm not sure what he's doing in this film bu...

A review by Forrest Humphrey It seems so rare we get an action flick that's actually good on multiple levels. Mad Max: Fury Road was one, and 2012's “Dredd” was another. Adapted from the long running comic series “2000 AD”, the film follows the titular Judge Dredd, played by Karl Urban, as he oversees rookie Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) on what's supposed to be a basic drug bust case for her first live mission. What they run into is Ma Ma (Lena Heady) and her vicious 'Ma Ma Clan'. Trapped by the gang in an enormous skyscraper, Dredd and Anderson have to fight for their lives and, if everything works out, stop the operation.  Dredd is a lean, no-nonsense dystopian sci-fi action thriller. It knows exactly how to spend its budget with great sets, costume design and of course, wonderfully visceral gunfights. Humor is dry and injected at just the right moments to keep the film fun without ruining the tension, and all of it is enhanced by a fantastic score o...

A review by Brooks Rich In the 1990's one of the biggest shows on television was Fox's mega hit The X Files. Nowadays Game of Thrones or The Sopranos might be considered the most groundbreaking television shows in history but in my opinion The X Files deserves credit for creating modern television as we know it. There would be no The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad without The X Files and their introduction to continuous storylines in television, which was usually only seen in daytime or primetime soap operas. It was this new way to tell a story that made the X Files a critical and cultural success, so much so that in 1998, between seasons five and six, the feature film opened in theaters. It was a hit as well, making 189.2 million dollars against a budget of about 66 million dollars.  The film of course follows Mulder and Scully as they adjust to life in the FBI after the X Files were closed in the previous season. A bombing in Texas puts them back on the trail ...

A review by Brooks Rich Sometimes a film comes along that I have so much to say about but have a hard time finding the right words. 1917 is easily the best film of 2019. It is the best war movie in years and easily one of the most stunningly shot films of the year, if not the best shot film of the year. Director Sam Mendes has crafted a masterpiece. The film follows two soldiers in April of 1917 during the first World War. Schofield and Blake, played by George Mackay and Dean-Charles Chapman, who a lot of you will know as King Tommen from Game of Thrones, are tasked with crossing no-man's land and sneaking behind enemy lines in an attempt to reach a platoon of soldiers and stop them from walking into a trap.  It's a simple plot. Two solders have to get from point A to point B. The film is also shot in what looks like one long continuous take. Of course this isn't true, it's all done in the editing, but it's a seamless effort on Mendes’ part and probably...

A review by Brooks Rich I was dubious when in 2007 a film directed by Ben Affleck came out. I thought, 'how is this going to be any good? Ben Affleck directing? Come on.' Holy shit that film was Gone Baby Gone and if you have not seen that masterpiece track it down immediately. Affleck followed that up in 2010 with the equally fantastic heist thriller The Town. Affleck plays Doug MacRay, a career criminal who pulls off a bank heist with his three lifelong friends. They take the assistant manager hostage but do end up releasing her unharmed. In order to make sure she doesn't know anything about their identities, Doug strikes up a friendship with the woman, eventually following for her. With an FBI agent played by Jon Hamm on his tail Doug must work to protect the woman he loves and pull off one final score, robbing Fenway Park. This film is brutal. Affleck's crime films are filled with corrupt characters who use violence as a first resort and never stop swearing. T...

Last year my most anticipated film of the year turned out to be the aggressively mediocre Brightburn so these are rolls of the dice. You never know what's going to be good or bad until you spend the two or so hours watching it. A lot of films I was looking forward to last year turned out to be either mediocre like Brightburn or just flat out awful like Midsommer. You just never know. But here each of us will pick one film we are excited for and give our reasons why. Come back after all four have come out and see who picked the best one. Trailers for each film will be linked below each section. Brooks As a huge Bond fan I should be excited for No Time To Die. While I am happy to see a new Bond film this year, I have worries with the news that they brought in Phoebe Waller-Bridge from Fleabag to add humor to the film and that Hans Zimmer is rescoring the film at the zero hour. So I have no huge excitement for No Time To Die. But the trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife has me excit...

We’ve seen quite a bit of filmmaking over the last 10 years, especially thanks to the House of Mouse and its MCU adventures. My piece here is going to be a short look at my favorite artists and work since 2009. Film: “Max. My name is Max. That’s my name.” 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road is a movie about a car chase. It’s also a movie about how good movies can be, and about how movies rock. Fury Road is the kind of movie like Jurassic Park, or Terminator 2, or The Matrix or the Lord of the Rings where you finish it and say “yeah, that’s exactly why I like watching movies. Because they’re fucking awesome.” George Miller returned to the silver screen with an absolute masterpiece and what will be recognized as his greatest accomplishment. A non-stop action spectacle that comes along once every decade. Every shot, every word, ever piece of the set put there to tell the story as efficiently and as mesmerizingly as possible. The fight scenes are crunchy. The engines are loud. The soundtrack put...

Azzam’s Best of the Decade: Best Film: Green Room I can’t lie this was hard. I originally planned on going with The Big Short which is a film I love deeply but after mulling it over I decided on a personal note as well as a level of test Green Room was the best film of this last decade. Green Room is the best horror film that isn’t built on mystical B.S or great mystery. It is real horror that real people fear. If you don’t know the plot of Green Room, it is the story of a hardcore punk band who randomly ends up playing at Nazi Punk Bar in a secluded location and on their exit they discover a body in the green room forcing them to survive the night. As a guy in a Metalcore band with another contributor of this site it feels like the best example of heavy music culture, shows, nazi/skinhead punk culture I have ever seen. It doesn’t baby around the fact that most band are nice sweet people but those who are violent are monsters and builds around something every musician knows well, a s...

A review by Brooks Rich This is one film I understand if someone says, "man that film was too slow for me." I completely get that. Blade Runner was a deliberately paced science fiction film. It was released in 1982 but it was paced more like a science fiction film from the '70s. Fans of Blade Runner should immediately track down the 1972 film Silent Running. If this blog had been around in 2017, Blade Runner 2049 would have been my favorite movie of the year. Honestly three out of the past four years have deliberately paced and heady science fiction films as my favorites for the year. Arrival in 2016, Blade Runner 2049 in 2017, and Ad Astra this past year. While Star Wars might be doing all it can to destroy the science fiction genre, there are directors out there doing all they can to keep it intelligent. Denis Villeneuve is my pick for director of the decade and while Arrival is in my opinion his best work, Blade Runner 2049 is right behind it. I think this film is ...

A review by Forrest Humphrey  The 2010's gave us a hell of a lot of comic book movies, and some of them were fantastic, like “Captain America: Winter Soldier”, “Dredd” and my personal favorite film of the decade, “Logan”. Many were solid, perfectly serviceable flicks to enjoy on a weekend afternoon. But some of them were also atrocious, like “Fantastic Four”, “X-Men Apocalypse” and “Suicide Squad.” But there is one that is so bad in so many ways that I move from simply tossing it in the bin and moving on, to actually hating it. Hate is a strong emotion, and even films I consider extremely poor like “Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom” or “The Predator” I don't actually outright hate them....okay I might hate “The Predator” a little bit.  “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” is hands down one of the worst films I have ever seen, but it goes beyond being poorly written, poorly conceived or taking influence from the worst possible sources. It brought comic fans to the same ki...

A review by Brooks Rich The horror genre actually took great strides this decade. We had some very interesting new voices emerge and create legit nightmares on films. I'm thinking of films like The Witch, The Lighthouse, and Hereditary. But we also had some big studio films actually work as legit horror films. Although it might not be the scariest film of the past decade, IT Chapter 1 is definitely one of the most well made horror films of the past decade and has maybe the best ensemble cast of young performers since Stand By Me. Hey, Stephen King knows how to write kids. Who fucking knew? I almost just want to refer to IT Chapter 1 as just IT because Chapter 2 is easily one of the worst of the decade. But that's for another post. Instead let's focus on the awesomeness that is the first film. For those that don't know IT takes place in 1989 in the small town of Derry, Maine. Seven outcasts discover that an evil clown named Pennywise, performed wonderfully by Bill Sk...

A review by Brooks Rich What does it take to be successful? How much is your soul worth? When is doing the right thing no longer worth it? Those are the questions at the heart of JC Chandor's deeply underrated 2014 film A Most Violent Year. Oscar Isaac plays Abel Morales, the head of a heating and oil company in New York City circa 1981. His business is struggling as his trucks keep getting hijacked and the DA's office is working on an indictment against him. Abel faces pressure to arm his drivers to protect his shipments but he doesn't want that to be the way he does business. It all comes to a head as Abel questions what makes a good man and how far one can do the right thing. Oscar Isaac is one of the best new actors to come out of the past decade and this is one of his best performances. He perfectly captures the turmoil of Abel Morales as he struggles to do what's right, even if the alternative is an easier solution. The film asks the question, how much does ...

As we near 2020 and the beginning of a new decade, we were hit with the idea of looking back on the last ten years of film and picking out our favorite things in a few categories. So I'd like to look back and present my own favorite actor, actress, director and overall film of the 2010's. Favorite Film Logan There are plenty of films I've really loved in the last decade. “It Chapter 1”, “The VVitch”, “Mr. Holmes”, “Pacific Rim”, “Mad Max Fury Road”, “The Magnificent Seven”, “Murder on the Orient Express”, and “Star Trek Beyond” just to name a few.  But nothing has stuck with me like “Logan.” I, like many, grew up watching Hugh Jackman play Wolverine, and after almost twenty years, getting a movie like this as the culmination of a career defining role was something to see. This film hurts, it viciously reminds you that your idols will grow old, maybe even be shadows of the figures you admired. “Logan” is bleak, depressing, and utterly committed to its ton...