Daily Archives: February 3, 2025

Deadline

An American TV reporter (Christopher Walken) arrives in Beirut to cover the war in Lebanon, and receives an unexpected invitation to tape an exclusive interview with a major PLO official who speaks out against violence. Before long, the reporter is accused by other PLO officials of having perpetrated a hoax, and accused by the Christian Phalangists of working for the PLO. Equivalent in some respects to Oliver Stone’s Salvador, this well-intentioned and efficient thriller by Israeli filmmaker Nathaniel Gutman, partially financed by German TV, explores some of the complexities of a major trouble spot through the moral reeducation of a cynical and flippant outsider. Nothing major, but capably scripted by Hanan Peled and crisply cut by Peter Przygodda, Wim Wenders’s usual editor. (JR) Read more

Best Seller

While it may not add up to anything very profound, this paranoid thriller is put together with so much craft and economy that a significant part of its pleasure is seeing how tightly and cleanly every sequence is hammered into place. Brian Dennehy is Dennis Meechum, an incorruptible police detective who doubles as a successful crime writer; James Woods is Cleve, a hit man who doubles as a corporate executive, and who wants Meechum to write a nonfiction best-seller exposing his ruthless and respectable former boss — a philanthropist tycoon who has stealthily slaughtered his way to the top. Dennehy’s square and skeptical cop is an adroit reading of a dull part, but he makes a wonderful straight man for Woods’s fascinatingly creepy yet sensitive killer — modeled in part on Robert Walker’s Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train, with a comparable homoerotic tension between the two men. Tautly and cleverly scripted by Larry Cohen, crisply shot by Fred Murphy, and directed by John Flynn without a loose screw in sight, this is first-class action storytelling stripped to its essentials: no shot is held any longer than is needed to make its narrative point, and the streamlining makes for a bumpless ride. Read more

Hot Shots!

For my money, this is funnier than all the Naked Guns combined, even down to the final joke-strewn credits. Putatively a parody of Top Gun, it also includes send-ups of Dances With Wolves, Full Metal Jacket, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Superman, and even Gone With the Wind. Directed and cowritten (with Pat Proft) by Jim Abrahams, one of the three writer-directors who launched Airplane!, this shares more with that 1980 laugh getter than an exclamation point and Lloyd Bridges; there’s also much of the same pleasure in milking cliches and ridiculing poker-faced straight men with their own compliance (Charlie Sheen is every bit as well cast here as Leslie Nielsen is in the Naked Gun movies), and the airborne antics are realized with a lovely sense of craft. With Cary Elwes, a very sexy Valeria Golino, Kevin Dunn, Jon Cryer, William O’Leary, Kristy Swanson, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (1991). (JR) Read more