Stephen Bjork

Setting aside weighty matters of politics, war, and natural disasters, one of the truly great tragedies of the modern age is that Guy Ritchie’s utterly delightful reboot of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. utterly failed to find an audience or establish a franchise. The world seems like a smaller place without this much-needed brand of escapism—it’s certainly significantly less cool (in more ways than one). Guy Ritchie has been peddling his own idiosyncratic brand of cool ever since his debut feature Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels back in 1998, and he’s refined it even more as his career has progressed. We’re talking about someone who successfully turned Sherlock Holmes into a stylish action hero, after all. If anyone seemed like a natural choice to reimagine the classic Cold War television series for the modern era, it’s Ritchie. Yet he wasn’t the first choice, the second choice, or even the third. Long is the way, and hard, that out of development hell leads up to light.

John Krasinski may have originally drawn significant attention to himself while playing Jim Halpert in NBC’s successful reboot of the BBC series The Office, but he was quietly working behind-the-scenes toward being something more than just a straight man opposite comic actors like Steve Carrell and Dwight Schrute. He directed three episodes of the show during its 9-year run, and in 2009, he made his feature filmmaking debut by writing, directing, and starring in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. He followed that up in 2016 with the dramatic comedy The Hollars, but neither one of these projects had much of a cultural impact, and they definitely didn’t make any money. Two years later, he opted for the Jordan Peele approach instead, writing and directing the smash hit horror story A Quiet Place. That film grossed $341 million worldwide against a $17 million budget, so clearly Krasinski had found his stride. Unsurprisingly, he stayed in that lane by quickly putting together the sequel A Quiet Place Part II. It cost three times as much to produce and didn’t make quite as much at the box office, but it was still a huge hit by any stretch of the imagination.

While it’s lovely that Warner Bros. has finally released Just Mercy on UHD, the fact that they’ve added nothing new to the mix, and even subtracted a few minor things like the different language options, only serves to highlight the fact that they should have just released it on UHD the first time back in 2020. Nothing has been gained by waiting four years to see the film in its best possible light. And yet Just Mercy in 4K really is seeing the film in its best possible light, so right or wrong, it’s great that Warner Bros. finally pulled the trigger. Given the behind-the-scenes chaos at the studio these days, sometimes you just have to take what you get from them.

Robert Altman was a filmmaker who stubbornly followed his own muse wherever it might take him, and he didn’t give a tinker’s damn what anyone else thought about that. He pursued the projects that he wanted to pursue, and while there’s no doubt that he was happy when audiences came along for the ride, that was never his primary concern (or even his secondary or tertiary concerns, for that matter). After the smash success of his landmark war comedy M*A*S*H, he felt no desire to rest on his laurels. Instead, he immediately turned around and made the offbeat Brewster McCloud, a film that was pretty much guaranteed to repel most of the audiences that had flocked to see M*A*S*H. Then, he gleefully deconstructed the western genre with McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and followed that up with the psychological thriller Quintet, a film that baffled critics and audiences alike. From there, he ended up deconstructing film noir and private detective fiction with The Long Goodbye, before finally making another detour to deconstruct Hollywood crime dramas with Thieves Like Us in 1974.

Godzilla Minus One (aka Gojira Mainasu Wan) has become a genuine phenomenon even in America, where it quickly became the highest-grossing Japanese language film of all time. That’s impressive by any metric, especially for the 30th live action installment in a seventy-year-old franchise. While Godzilla movies can be a little divisive, with everyone having their own favorites, the reaction to Godzilla Minus One has been uniformly positive. It’s been something of a revelation to many people, which is interesting considering that it’s undeniably derivative of all the films that came before it. The genius of writer/director Takashi Yamazaki is that he took all those familiar elements and combined them in a way that manages to feel fresh, even to hardened fans of the franchise. It’s more of a refinement than a revelation, and where Godzilla Minus One really shines is in its execution rather than its conception. Yet the key to making all of that work is still a conceptual choice on the part of Toho and Yamazaki.

When RKO Pictures assigned producer Val Lewton to their horror unit in 1942, no one could have possibly predicted the astounding legacy that he would leave behind. From 1942 to 1946, Lewton gifted RKO with nine idiosyncratic and poetic films, all of them based on the principle of leaving most of the horror to the imaginations of viewers. RKO would give Lewton a lurid title to work with, but as long as he stayed within a limited budget, they also gave him relative freedom to create whatever he wished. It wasn’t complete independence, as the studio did occasionally interfere, but for the most part he was able to achieve his own personal vision for each film. The results speak for themselves, and while they weren’t always successful at the box office, every one of Lewton’s horror films has something unique to offer.

Carlo Ledesma’s The Tunnel was the first Australian horror movie to land at the intersection between two different modern cultural trends: “found footage” films and crowdfunding efforts. It was hardly the first Australian found footage film, of course, with others like Lake Mungo having broken that ground previously. And just like Lake Mungo before it, The Tunnel doesn’t use the found footage conceit as a mere stylistic affectation, but rather weaves it into the fabric of the film itself. That’s because both films are full-fledged mockumentaries that use found footage material as part of a retrospective examination of previous events—supposed footage from those past events is incorporated into a “new” documentary structure. In all other respects, however, The Tunnel is pure Blair Witch Project, with more than a whiff of Gary A. Sherman’s debut feature Raw Meat thrown in for good measure. It’s a journey to a dark destination where the participants end up finding more than they bargained for. It’s really the crowdfunding angle that sets The Tunnel apart, at least from a behind-the-scenes perspective, but more on that in a moment.

Five years before directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein pointed their sights at the world of fantasy role playing games with the delightful Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, they took aim at the broader gaming culture in general with Game Night—and they took a few pot shots at David Fincher in the process, too. That’s due in no small part to the fact that writer Mark Perez’s story for Game Night is a pretty blatant riff on John Brancato and Michael Ferris’ script for The Game. Yet while Fincher had used their idea of a live action role-playing game run amok as a vehicle to explore personal trauma, familial guilt, and rampant paranoia, Daley and Goldstein stripped away the layers of metaphor and took the concept at face value. Game Night is a tale of deception set in a world where deception is an inherent part of good gamesmanship, so it openly celebrates the ability to take others by surprise. All’s fair in love and war, but anything goes when gaming sessions are involved.

Dario Argento has long been renowned as one of the master visual stylists in the horror genre, with his prowling camerawork and elaborate color design working together in his own trademarked fashion. Of course, he’s also a master aural stylist, making use of driving prog rock scores from the likes of Goblin in order to support these distinctive visuals. With Argento, sound and image work together in perfect harmony. While that harmony hasn’t always extended to the thematic level, it did so just as perfectly in his 1987 film Opera (aka Terror at the Opera). It’s a story that revolves around a production of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Teatro Regio opera house in Parma, Italy, yet it’s as much focused on the act of seeing as it is on the act of listening. It’s also focused on the act of Becoming, but more on that in a moment.

While there have been plenty of horror films throughout cinematic history that have been landmarks of the horror genre, only a few of those can be considered as broader cultural landmarks that have transcended genre and tapped into something more universal. The Exorcist is one such film, since its cultural reach far transcended the bounds of typical horror fandom. While Warner Bros. had no faith in the film (no pun intended) and tried to dump it in late December on a small handful of screens, The Exorcist quickly became a phenomenon that lasted for a whopping 105 weeks at the box office, forcing the studio to expand its release in order to keep up. Audiences were lining up around the block to see it, quite literally so, regardless of how unpleasant that the winter weather may have been. The Exorcist was the “It” movie of 1973 that remained an “It” movie for the next two years as well. Yet to understand why this religious-themed horror film touched that kind of cultural nerve, you need to turn not to original novelist William Peter Blatty, but rather to Stephen King. We’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s start with Blatty first.