Not enough Will Gibson movies, but this is a good one.
358912
This is a very good, intelligent B-movie in the science fiction realm- especially if you have ever enjoyed some of William Gibson's stories. Having Wil Dafoe and Asia Argento in this is a very nice bonus, but not the only things that make this film so good. It is this director's raw talent in directing, as seen in all his gritty thrillers, combined with a great SF author and good job by the screen writer. I do not write reviews about romances or comedies, and I wish some others who do not care for a genre would offer the same courtesy. This is an excellent film. I had no trouble following the story, but had read the short story 10 years prior- so was vaguely familiar. Have also read nearly all William Gibson's novels, so very familiar with the concepts which some might find hard to follow.
936996
If you can get passed the fact that Mel Gibson has become what he's become then I think you would really enjoy this movie. It bears no real connection to Mad Max near as I can tell even though it is considered a sequel. The look of the film influenced a lot of post-apocalyptic movies from this era. Lord Humongous remains one of the most intimidating bad guys you're likely to see in a movie. The stunt work and car chases are top notch. Gibson shows just enough of the character's humanity to make him sympathetic but not enough to make him unrealistic for the harsh world in which he lives. Buy this but I'd avoid Beyond Thunderdome; it's inferior to Road Warrior and Mad Max in every way and has too many child actors.
706101
Since 2003 movies dealing with some form of torture have made a pretty big comeback; back in the 60s through the early part of the 80s these kinds of movies were rather popular before some what fading away. But since 2003 these movies are coming back and the major difference is these flicks are now mainstream rather than cult. Frontiers is the latest torture flick, this one out of France.

While as a whole I enjoyed I can't help, but think if this was an American movie it would probably get more heat. Frontiers takes a little bit of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original or remake) and takes a whole lot of Hostel as well as other exploitation inspired movies. The fact this movie is French and not American it won't be seen by as big of an audience in the States; I think Frontiers is an excellent movie, but I can't help, but think some of the praise is due to it not being American. Frontiers, while it is enjoyable really has nothing original to be found.

Frontiers is quite twisted, but hardly as shocking as it's made out to be for those who know their exploitation cinema whether it be the old school or the newer ones I doubt this one will shock you much unless you are easily shocked. With that said though of all the recent hash of 70s inspired exploitation flicks, Frontiers would probably rate as one of the better ones. Making a movie like this isn't as easy as most people think it is. The common belief is torture people in the most brutal of ways and that's it.

I personally think there is more to it than that. The biggest problems movies like this often suffer from are characters who really aren't all that sympathetic and villains who are way too likeable. When the villains start spitting out one-liners they become too likeable. Thankfully Frontiers avoids that, but there is still a problem with the characters not being sympathetic.

Writer Xavier Gens does a pretty good job with the script, while the characters lacked depth and untimely weren't all that sympathetic I suppose what they go through makes up for their lack of depth and sympathy. The basic idea behind the script is your run of the mill backwoods killer movie. Like I said it takes a little bit of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a lot of Hostel just without the comedy. The script is dark, which is good and the villains are just that.

Xavier Gens also directs and is able to put together some fairly good suspense scenes and is able to keep the pace moving forward for the most part. Frontiers received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA and people talk about how gory it is. Actually, Frontiers really wasn't that gory with the exception of the power saw scene and the amazingly awesome shotgun blast to the head. Besides that the gore isn't very extreme it's just the movie has constant violence. Sometimes a movie can be so dark and mean spirited people tend to think it was gorier than it actually was. Frontiers has gore, but only 2 scenes of extreme gore.

Xavier Gens does a solid job though; he takes a very clichd movie and makes it much better than maybe it should have been. Frontiers isn't as shocking as one might lead you to believe, but it does have some very dark and twisted scenes and Gens delivers one of the better torture flicks of the decade.

The only problem is the movie does tend to run a bit longer than it needed to be. Without closing credits Frontiers runs at about 104-minutes and it easily could have been wrapped up in 90-95-minutes. Despite running longer than it needed to the pacing never really lags too much. While the excitement level might drop a little it never gets boring.

Overall Frontiers is a well-made and enjoyable movie; despite the clichs, which are many the movie works well and again is one of the better recent hash of torture flicks.
3161176
Robert Mitchum plays Ben Kane who teams up with  the eponymous Billy Young and they  become lawmen in the town of Lordsburg .He is motivated by personal reasons as well as professional-he believes he will find the slayer of his son in Lordsburg .Young (Robert Walker)is himself on the run and is a former associate of the bad guy ,Jesse Boone(David Carradine)and his vicious father(John Anderson) and part of the movie hinges on Billy's desire for  redemption and  to turn away from the outlaw life .It is no mean feat that Kane sets himself -the rscue of Billy,cleaning up Lordsburg ,avenging his son's death and romancing the delectable Angie Dickinson ,cast here as a dance hall  girl

Andrew V McLaglen directs with style and the performances are uniformly strong .Indeed ,given the importance of family in the story of the movie,it is appropriate that  several offspring of notable stars figure in the cast -Carradine ,Walker Jones(son of Jennifer Jones) Chris Mitchum and Deana Martin also appear

This is not a great Western but it is a good one  and will be appreciated by lovers of the genre .I also strongly recommend the source novel Who Rides With Wyatt by Will Henry -its  very good indeed
2101055
True the dialogue is at times lacking and the plot isn't particularly original, but this is a solid film.  The cinematography is fantasitic and scenes will keep you engaged.  The basic premis is one that has been done countless times, but there is more than enough originality in the way the themes are presented to make this film worthwhile.  As an added bonus there is plenty of blood and guts to keep any action movie enthusiast entertained.
4404371
Gibson's fiction is tersely written. Do not look to be hand held and walked down some primrose path into a story line draped with filler and festooned with adjectives. Gibson's methodology is to air drop you into the action and sprint you, boots on the ground, from action to action. Information is on a need-to-know basis and often left to the reader's imagination to fill in. Who cares what a "squidsuit"
really looks like? Fill in the blanks from what he tells you it does. Fab most often refers to fabricated goods of one kind or another. The core of this novel deals with intellectual properties and economic shifts in a not too far flung future.
One way of reading this novel is with the movie: "winter's bone" in mind. Flynne and her brother are similar to that family. Tommy is that police guy.
This is so far the most demanding read produced by Gibson and therefore a much slower read than his previous works. Anyone looking to start reading his works at this juncture will be put off so best start with anything else and work up. The cast in this is not as sympathetically rendered as in previous works so that there is some distance between the reader and almost everyone involved but it supports the futuristic tone overall and works to the book's advantage. Well worth the read and hopefully his next work will come sooner than later.
2518038
"Righteous Kill" hasn't been all that well-received -- Rotten Tomatoes is down on it -- but it seems to me at least as good as two other movies I've seen lately that were better received: "Stand-Up Guys" and "The Departed."  I liked the latter, but it was a bit bloated, and one wonders whether Scorsese's name got it more credit that it deserved.  "Stand-Up Guys" was quirkier, but gave Al Pacino a bit more opportunity to chew the scenery.  In all three, though, I wouldn't fault the acting -- such problems as there are are more with script and pacing, and I actually quite enjoyed all three.  "Righteous Kill" is very strongly cast, with Pacino, De Niro, Leguizamo, Donnie Wahlberg, Dennehy, Curtis Jackson (aka 50 Cent), and Carla Gugino.  All of them do good work.  The plot is very clever, and the mode of narration, which is a complicated form of flashback, is well-handled.  The limitations of the movie are the limitations of the genre, which as some reviewers have commented, aren't all that different from the limitations of, say, "Law and Order" episodes, but "L&A" was a solid show, and so is this.  Also, it comes in at well under two hours, and packs a lot of incident into that time frame.

The plot is clever, and I want to avoid spoilers, so I'll say no more than that it's a serial-killer search movie and that it puts a lot of weight on conflicts within a police department, where two different teams of cops (Pacino/De Niro and Leguizamo/Wahlberg) are working aspects of the same case (or cases, given that serial killing is the issue) and taking different views of the case.  Brian Dennehy is underused as their boss, and Carla Gugino is a forensics detective with whom they all interact and who is in many ways the most interesting character in the movie.  What makes her interesting becomes clear quite early, but I won't spoil your discovery of it in case you haven't seen the movie yet.

I wonder if some of the disappointment in the movie has to do with seeing De Niro and Pacino together (for the first time, really, for they hardly interacted in "Heat") in a movie that is pretty generic.  Both have played in cop-thrillers before, and while they are given some personality quirks in the script that individualize them reasonably interestingly, these roles are hardly a stretch for either of them.  That said, they are very effective.  Neither one seems to be "dialing it in," so there's real pleasure in seeing two old pros going at it -- a bit like the pleasure of seeing Alan Arkin, Pacino, and Walken in "Stand-Up Guys."  Yes, it would be nice to see "King Lear" with De Niro and Pacino as Lear and Gloster -- certainly a better script and more room to dig into character there -- but that's not going to happen, so we take what we can get and enjoy it for what it is.  Pacino's natural flamboyance is still there but well subordinated to the demands of characterization, and older De Niro's taciturnity is likewise familiar and yet given a twist.  All in all, it's not a great movie, but it's very far from a disaster.
1068627
I was very impressed with "We Were Soldiers", the story of the first major conflict between American soldiers and the Vietcong.  The film, written for the screen and directed by Randall Wallace, and starring Mel Gibson in one of his best roles ever, is an unconventional look at war, especially the Vietnam War.  Rejecting the ambiguity and claustrophobic horror of such classics as "The Deer Hunter" and "Platoon", it presents an almost worshipful look at the American soldier, sure, but it gives us a reason to label these men heroes.  It is a simple, but poignant, glance into the brotherhood of soldiers as they fight to stay alive in the midst of absolute horror.  "We Were Soldiers" shows that war is hell, but it doesn't lose itself in it.  The benefit of 30+ years has allowed filmmakers to look back on this horrific period in history with some perspective.  What I like about "We Were Soldiers" is that it doesn't even attempt to justify our presence in Vietnam, but it vilifies no one.  The Vietcong are presented as men who believe in what they're doing as much as the Americans, if not more.  This might be one of the first films to attempt to provide an objective view of the "enemy".  It was refreshing; there's been enough propaganda in the media.  I'm tired of being told how to feel about Vietnam.  "We Were Soldiers" takes the viewer right into the middle of combat, in a manner similar to "Saving Private Ryan" and "Black Hawk Down".  The bullets whiz past OUR heads, the screams of the wounded and dying fill OUR ears, the heat of the explosions burns US.  Randall Wallace's direction is very evocative; I found myself trying to slink down like the actors.  Speaking of actors, this film has got some good ones.  Mel Gibson is superb as Col. Hal Moore; he embodied the role like he was born to play it.  Barry Pepper, Greg Kinnear, Chris Klein, and others were similarly outstanding.  I also appreciated the portrait of Army wives; the sequence in which Madeleine Stowe (Moore's wife) and Keri Russell (Chris Klein's wife) hand-deliver death-announcement telegrams to the wives is devastating.  There are some standard war movie cliches in "We Were Soldiers", but overall, I thought it was an impressive achievement.  My dad, a Vietnam veteran, agreed.
4445143
I like CE movies and this is one that was not highly advertised.......but is a very good one. In honesty I had not seen it for  years but remembered how well I liked it.....but with the impending holidays have not had time to watch it again. But will assure you it is worth watching
2417016
I am not a big movie watcher but I will watch this more than once.
270580
I have an on/off relationship with Gibson's books.  The Peripheral drips cools and style and just generally very clever writing.  Where it falls short is having much of a payoff at the end.

To be fair, 3/5 is a bit harsh.  It is not a bad book and a lesser writer would deserve 4 stars, easily.  But Mr. Gibson is capable of much better.

In criticizing the payoff I don't mean that it doesn't have a plot.  It does, and, yes, it is hard plot to follow at the start.  Characters come and go, without introduction.  Often he seems to make deliberately hard to track who is speaking and who is who.  For example, Flynn at the start refers to her mother, to a person called Janice and to a person called Ella.  It took me some time to narrow down that Janice was a friend and Ella was the mother.  No big deal, this book rewards paying attention and I had probably missed something in the initial presentation.

Eventually, by page 100 or so, the plot somewhat settles down.  Vintage Gibson plot - multiple unrelated character groups, shadowy conspiracies. You get to understand that there are two different time periods, one in Flynn's time and one about 75 years in its future and their relationship is not your standard time travel yarn.

And, yes, that idea is just COOL.

Other things that are cool are Gibson's trademark capacity to describe the world in clever and thought provoking ways.  That's where the good writing comes in - Gibson is a SF writer, sure, but he's got a style that can compete with many mainstream lit authors'.

For example - "this was a scuba documentary, one about Lower Manhattan".  Other writers would have yapped at length about global warming, Gibson throws out a short elliptical quip instead.  He is in form here and channels a fair bit of Bruce Sterling vibes about urban and rural nomads scraping by in a dispossessed and semi-functional society and environment.  This has always been Gibson's strength but he's added a fair bit of Sterling's tech acumen.  Truth is, he's done this all before but it is well done.  That's what I read his books for, along with his quirky insights about people and things.

The problem is that Peripheral, as a whole, is hung up on the flimsiest of backstory.

There is an exciting action sequence at the end.  But once that is done, we get a very pedestrian conclusion, with a justification for the plot that he is semi-recycling from one of his earlier books.  The synopsis could fit in one paragraph and in fact Gibson barely bothers to make it any longer than that.

All this journey, to find out the whole fuss was about this???  Doesn't throw the reader much of a bone.

Frustrating to say the least.  The time travel aspect had a lot more meat to it and is very inventively done.  This is Gibson after all, he coined terms like 'cyberspace' and 'virtual reality'.

To put it differently, there were three elements to Pattern Recognition's success.  The protagonist, Cayce, the recurring narrative about coolhunting, and the conclusion (which was also somewhat weaker).

Flynn has potential,  sure, but, as written, is not as compelling as Cayce (Logo-phobia?  Genius).  Netherton starts out brilliantly when shown manipulating Daedra, but then kinda simmers down to be the anchorpoint in futureland.

The time travel angle, while clever, is nowhere as developed as coolhunting.  More exactly we, the readers, got coolhunting.  It was a super clever idea, but once it explained we could run with it.  The time travel bit deserves a lot more attention than it gets in Peripheral.  Or else it can't be passed as the main subject and there is no other main subject.

The scenes that make up the book are individually situationally clever writing but lack an overall soul.  And the explanation for everything at the end is flimsier than Pattern's.
2047687
Love these movies but this one seemed kind of a little slow -- I know that's heresy but there are others which, while they are not "all battle" remain very interesting (Stand By For Action earns every rave it has gotten). It's well produced, covers a lot of territory from WWII to Korean, lots of scenes of aircraft including early jets taking off; but there's some real-life emotional territory my wife liked; -- heck we're amassing every one of these great shows we can. Sterling is good, and I'd put this in the category of "Up Periscope" -- pretty good. Bridges of Toko-Rei is a great one and Ben-Hur is great, if that helps.  Manilla Calling is very good; just can't say this one is great because I do like a little more action.
1646932
As of now I've seen 5 of these 8 movies, and those I've seen are respectable productions with good acting and scripts, although most of these 1950s era films are not among the best Westerns ever made. The movie books I've looked these up in, Leonard Maltin's and Martin & Porter's guides, generally agree with my assessment that most of these are good but not top-notch, although the Maltin guide does give especially glowing reviews to "The Lawless Breed" and "Man from the Alamo." I thought that "Seminole" was also a stand-out drama as Rock Hudson tries to protect Seminole Indians from a belligerent captain (ably played by Richard Carlson), although I wonder why this is considered a "Western" since it's set in Florida. For the price I'm surprised that these movies look and sound as good as they do - I'm watching them on a 50-inch high definition TV, but still they look and sound quite good. I doubt that any Western fans would be disappointed in this set, especially considering the low price.
3887350
I only watched this because I'm a big fan of Mel Gibson, who is good in this but underutilized.  Demian Bichir gives a quite wonderful performance as well. I gave this one star for each of their performances. Otherwise.... eh.
2236351
Ransom showcases Melvin Gibson in more of an acting role than do many of his past films, and the theater lessons he has been taking are apparent in this fine mystery/drama.  He occasionally frowns as he talks, his delivery being far more low-key than in, say, Lethal Weapon -- when his acting consisted of coupling dialog with lots of wild facial expressions and eye-rolling.  It's obvious that Melvin employs what he learns; in his next film, Conspiracy Theory, he combined the tight frowning from Ransom with the wild stuff from Lethal Weapon, and ascended another rung on the Acting Ladder.  It has been a pleasure to watch Melvin Gibson work and strive, these past two decades, to become an accomplished film actor.  Melvin is beginning to make encouraging progress, and it is apparent that, at some point in some future movie, he will actually act -- he ALMOST did so, in "Signs" -- and grow to be more than just a pretty face.
572968
Some reviewers don't understand genre- they give movies like this a low rating because it doesn't have a human element in the plot on par with say, "Downton Abbey". On the other hand, movies like "Transformers" are all eye candy but have little plot at all and can be unbearable.

Pacific Rim has all the eye candy (monsters and robots beating the living #$%^$%# out of each other) while having enough plot to glue it all together nicely, unlike Transformers.

I think it is a good balance- I hope they make a sequel.
3348528
This movie isn't all that bad, the action is good, the alien designs are different from recent alien invasion movies like Battle:Los Angeles, Skyline, & Cloverfield, as they seem to create some form of energy field that they use for invisible camouflage and is also their main weapon. The main cast in the film are regular civilian characters that in the beginning are far from being hero-types and react like everyone else in their situation with initial shock and fear not knowing who or what is attacking them and why. But as the story progresses they begin to learn about their new enemy and start adapting to survive being less and less victims and turning into fighters from the experience of now having to face the horrors of war. The character development was great for me at least for this particular reason. The special effects aren't amazing but it wasn't a big deal for me, I really enjoyed this flick and feel that it deserves a little better reception from critics because I really don't feel like this is a flawed film and Id think it be great if they made a sequel. So if your a sci-fi or alien invasion film fan I would suggest giving it a shot and rent it (at least to try and satisfy your appetite until The Avengers hits theaters next week), for anyone else I would recommend this too, but If your not into these kinds of movies then you should probably pass but I leave it up to you. FINAL SCORE: 4/5