Author Archive: Kyle Barrowman
Kyle Barrowman is a graduate of the Cinema Studies program at Columbia College in Chicago. In addition to his work for Film Monthly, he has previously published essays for Cashiers du Cinemart, Offscreen, and The International Journal of Žižek Studies, on subjects ranging from film noir to Alfred Hitchcock, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Lee.
Seeking Justice
Thirty-year veteran Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, Cocktail, Species, and, more recently, The Bank Job) directs the king of cartoonishly over-the-top acting, Nicolas Cage, in a shockingly restrained and sympathetic performance as a husband sent on a Hitchcockian journey to the depths of his capacity for violence. Following the brutal rape of his wife, Laura [...]
The Bling Ring
The story on which the 2011 Lifetime movie The Bling Ring is based has, for whatever reason(s), struck a chord with audiences. First of all, if Lifetime makes a movie based on a story, that’s a pretty good indicator right there that it’s a popular issue in the public discourse. But then, when TV shows [...]
The Frank Sinatra Film Collection
In every era of film history, the acting profession, the home for dedicated thespians who prefer the camera to the proscenium, has served equally as a home for musicians. Some simply sought to cash in on or extend their notoriety while others had a genuine love of the craft. Reigning as the all-time great musician-turned-actor, [...]
Girl Fight
Pretty much since its inception, Lifetime has suffered from an unfair stigmatization that has precluded many moviegoers from fairly appraising their productions. For many, to talk about Lifetime movies is to talk about “chick flicks,” “tear-jerkers,” or “man-hating” films. At best, Lifetime movies are categorized by moviegoers as “social problem” films, an accurate though still [...]
Immortals
Ever since movies like Sin City and 300, the level of style in action movies continues to increase. Some filmmakers, like Michael Mann and Christopher Nolan, try their best to keep their action grounded in plausibility, whereas others simply take each successive stylized actioner as a challenge to one-up them the next time out. So [...]
Spellbinder
Spellbinder is a really weird, really fun ’80s film that is equal parts The Wicker Man and Angel Heart with some Poltergeist sprinkled on top because. . .well. . .why not? Directed by Janet Greek (she went on to be an active television director, but more importantly, she wrote two episodes of Renegade, which means [...]
Recoil
In 2007, when Stone Cold Steve Austin decided to make the move from the wrestling world to the action movie world, it seemed like a good idea. A natural progression. And films such as The Condemned, The Stranger, and Hunt to Kill attest to the type of exciting action to which he can contribute his [...]
UFC – Ultimate Fight Collection 2011 Edition
Tomorrow night, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) will finish their historic 2011 run of fight cards with UFC 141, which features a #1 contender bout between Heavyweight Championship contenders Alistair Overeem and former UFC Heavyweight Champion, Brock Lesnar. Before heading into 2012, which is sure to bring just as many, if not more, memorable bouts [...]
Catch .44
For about twenty years now, the sub-genre known as “Wannabe Tarantino” has been responsible for a pretty sizable output of films, the most recent being writer/director Aaron Harvey’s Catch .44, which at least has the distinction of having Bruce Willis in the cast, ironically playing a Marsellus Wallace type of crime lord. As is often [...]
Tora! Tora! Tora!
In 1970, director Richard Fleischer set out to make an objective World War II film, one that would not vilify the Japanese at the expense of the exaltation of American valor and would instead merely present the facts as they happened. The new 20th Century Fox Blu-ray release of the film calls it “meticulously researched [...]
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