‘Behold,’ the Fairy cried, ‘Palmyra’s ruined palaces! Behold where grandeur frowned! Behold where pleasure smiled! What now remains?’ — “Queen Mab,” Book II, 109-13 When…
Way back in 2000, coming off a critical and box office slump that consumed most of the ’90s, Ridley Scott struck back with Gladiator. (It’s…
Any discussion of the 20th century’s most brutal novels in American literature must include Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho…
Ridley Scott is 85 years old and has directed, among other things, four feature films in the last five years, one of which was heavily…
House of Gucci is relentlessly entertaining spectacle, utterly soapy and only occasionally undermined by some bland prestige film sheen. Ridley Scott goes two-for-two this year, first…
The Last Duel is another win for Scott, an agreeably brutal, wickedly incisive tale that is considerably more substantive than mere Rashomon comps. Blending his lavish but…
At the crossroads of about a half-dozen genres and borrowing the best that each has to offer, there’s no other movie quite like Ridley Scott’s…
…Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its…
In addition to the spectacle of characters struggling to outlast the elements, survival-specific adventure films typically involve some sort of additional antagonist. Some guy’s trapped…
The recent controversy over the casting of predominantly white actors in Middle Eastern roles in Exodus: Gods and Kings is, it turns out, the least…
For a while, it seemed like 2013 had front-loaded its highlights; many films making our Top 20 either played the festival circuit in 2012 before finally…