Kinemalogue: Action

Showing posts with label Action. Show all posts

Thursday, May 28, 2026

Sherwood Week: Sheriff don't like it

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES

1991

Directed by Kevin Reynolds

Written by Pen Densham and John Watson

Spoilers: inapplicable, really

Sherwood Week: He's not the Marian kind

ROBIN AND MARIAN

1976

Directed by Richard Lester

Written by James Goldman

Spoilers: moderate shifting pretty immediately into severe, and I guess you could feel deceived that I said it was ever "moderate"

Sherwood Week: Grinning and baron it

THE BANDIT OF SHERWOOD FOREST

1946

Directed by Henry Levin and George Sherman

Written by Wilfred H. Pettitt and Melvin Levy

THE SON OF ROBIN HOOD

1958

Directed by George Sherman

Written by George S. Slavin and George W. George (no, really)

Spoilers for either: moderate

Punch-drunk love

MORTAL KOMBAT II

2026

Directed by Simon McQuoid

Written by Jeremy Slater (actually based, remarkably enough, more than anything else on the video game Mortal Kombat II by Ed Boon and John Tobias)

Spoilers: moderate

There [still won't] be blood

MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION

1997

Directed by John R. Leonetti

Written by Lawrence Kasanoff, Joshua Wexler, John Tobias, Brent Friedman, and Bryan Zabel (based on the video game Mortal Kombat 3 by Ed Boon and John Tobias)

Spoilers: moderate

One battle after another

MORTAL KOMBAT

1995

Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

Written by Kevin Droney (based on the video game by Ed Boon and John Tobias)

Spoilers: moderate

Sherwood Week: This saucy fellow

THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD

1938

Directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley

Written by Rowland Leigh, Norman Reilly Raine, and Seton I. Miller

Spoilers: N/A

00 Week: The fear of Voodoo and the supernatural, still deeply, primevally ingrained

LIVE AND LET DIE

1973

Directed by Guy Hamilton

Written by Tom Mankiewicz (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

Reviews from gulag: Get behind me 2025 (part 1?)

More capsule or at least capsulish reviews as we finally finish cleaning up the movies of the previous year, three months and change into the new one. Herein we discuss Resurrection, House of Dynamite, Black Bag, and The Running Man.

RESURRECTION

Can you guess the theme of these five graybles? I didn't, despite it being exactly as childishly simple as The Senses, which I choose to hold against the movie rather than myself because it did "taste" twice; or at least it obscured "touch"—the segment with vampires is the one that does "touch"—though since that one is also the long take with the stabilized camera, maybe that was intended to expand our consciousness and include "the vestibular."

Resurrection is legitimately less than the sum of its parts, as sometimes happens with anthologies, and I'm not even altogether sold on most of the parts, though the opening is pretty nifty and seems like it ought to be in possession of a more interesting movie following on from it, not so much because of its framing narrative (that framing narrative—"IN A WORLD WHERE DREAMS ARE AGAINST THE LAW, ONE MAN IS A CINEPHILE"—is, I'm sorry, as off-puttingly wanky as it gets), but because it's a fascinating pastiche of silent cinema and early silent cinema at that, remarkably opting not to surrender color nor even allowing itself to be restrained by the primitive limitations of early color processes (though handschiegl and general-issue tinting are, nevertheless, 100% evoked), but still very much managing to remind you of early Technicolor despite blatantly surpassing its capabilities, and bridging the rest of the gap with aspect ratio, shot selection, what amounts to basically non-editing, set design, obviously that framerate, and some good old Meliesisms. Very cool, and I was a bit stoked to see how the advent of sound was treated as we follow Jackson Yee, playing a dreamer in various guises in various dreams, is explicitly sent on a death odyssey through history, generally, and the history of film, specifically, an art form well known for its engagement of all of the five senses.