While Raiders of the Lost Ark might have been the first-time audiences met Indy, The Last Crusade showed us Indy's earliest adventure. The opening flashback features young Indy (played by River Phoenix) taking on some treasure hunt
Harking back to the pulpy adventure serials they grew up on, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas brought a delightfully old-school vision to action cinema in 1981’s Raiders of the lost ark strategy Ark . Ice-cool adventurer Indiana Jones is the quintessential Harrison Ford character and he got an unforgettable introduction in Raide
No moment sums up the Indiana Jones character better than this one. In the middle of the Cairo melee, a crowd clears the way between Indy and a master swordsman who wants to challenge him to a duel. The swordsman does a bunch of impressive acrobatics with his sword to show Indy the kind of opponent he’s up against. And instead of indulging the swordsman, Indy just takes out his revolver and shoots
What follows is an intense dramatization of the massacre, in which the Black September terrorist group takes 11 members of the Israeli Olympics team hostage before killing them. The carefully planned opening shot reflects the carefully planned attack we’re about to see play
While turning Marcus Brody into a bumbling comedic relief character was unfortunate, the interplay between Indy and his father is often hilarious. It's great seeing Indy revert to this child desperate for his father's approval and to see Connery playing the proper scholar who is appalled by all the violence around
This feature of John Logan's play about abstract artist Mark Rothko sees Molina taking center stage as the complicated, aging painter. Set over 1958 and 1959, the play traces Rothko's relationship with his assistant as he works on large commercial pieces for the Four Seasons ho
It’s appropriate that the movie begins with a pan down from the night sky, filled with stars, that settles on a familiar forest landscape. It symbolizes E.T.’s arrival on Earth from up there. It also straps us in for a movie that brings science-fiction concepts to our doors
Molina plays Dudley's archenemy Snidely Whiplash, the kind of classic antagonist who dons a top hat and a handlebar mustache. Dudley Do-Right bombed at the box office, its zany antics ultimately landing on deaf e
With the masterfully simplistic premise of an elite squad infiltrating a high-rise controlled by a drug kingpin, Gareth Evans kept the focus of The Raid solely on the action. There’s no exposition or unnecessary subplots, just an all-out war between cops and cro
Karen Allen brings so much humor, heart, and fun to the character. From her first scene where we find her in the midst of a drinking contest, she makes for an unforgettable character who is a welcome addition to this advent
Inspired by the classics of the martial arts genre – particularly the blood-drenched productions of the Shaw Brothers’ studio – Quentin Tarantino made his stamp as an action director in his fourth film, Kill Bill . Uma Thurman stars as the Bride, an ex-assassin who seeks vengeance against the former colleagues who left her for d
But that thing with Harrison doing the shooting instead of the sword sequence, which was rehearsed, was because he got ill. It wasn't for time purposes. We all got dysentery from Tunisia, working there. I think the only people who didn't get ill were Steven, who had his food flown in cans from Fortnum & Mason, and Howard G. Kazanjian, the producer. Everyone else at some point or other got ill, I think - I'm trying to remember whether Karen got ill. Anyway, I got ill right at the end of the picture. But Harrison got ill when he was meant to do that sword fight that he'd rehearsed the day before, and he just couldn't move that much. If he'd moved, he'd have had a terrible accident. So he said, "Why don't I just shoot the f*cker?" And that's how that wonderful moment came aro
Swelter tries hard to be an edgy contemporary Western , but it falls very, very short of its goal. This heist film stars Lennie James as a former professional thief turned small-town sheriff who is hunted down by his former breth
All of the Indiana Jones movies have an inventive opening shot that matches the Paramount logo. In Raiders of the Lost Ark , it’s a distant mountain shrouded by jungle mist. In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull , when things went off the rails, it’s a pile of dirt, complete with a computer-generated gop
Spielberg’s WWII epic Saving Private Ryan , the one that induced PTSD attacks in war veterans, opens and closes with the same image: an American flag, blowing in the wind, color-graded with a very bleak, washed-out palette. Some critics have called these shots contradictory to the movie’s message. Saving Private Ryan is poised as an unpatriotic, anti-war film, yet it’s impossible to see the American flag as anything other than patriotic. The desaturated colors could be seen as Spielberg having his cake and eating it,