John Frankenheimer: The Train

Growing up with action films in the ‘80s and ‘90s — memorizing every John Woo slow-mo gun battle, every world-weary Bruce Willis character quip, every Ah-nold one-liner, and every single frame of something like Lethal Weapon — I didn’t have to look hard to see the influence that Frankenheimer’s approach to the action film in The Train had on the films that I remember so fondly from my formative years. I love what Matt Zoller Seitz says in his remembrance of The Train, calling it: “A huge, roiling,...

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John Frankenheimer: Seven Days in May

Based on the best-selling novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Waldo Bailey II, Seven Days in May is sometimes referred to as Frankenheimer resting on his laurels by following up his previous film — the masterful The Manchurian Candidate — with yet another paranoid political thriller. That’s a bit unfair, though. Seven Days in May doesn’t have much in common with The Manchurian Candidate. It takes itself too seriously to be a satire, and it seems that Frankenheimer and his screenwriter, Rod Serling,...

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The Wolf of Wall Street

I want to hold off on making any kind of declarative statements about The Wolf of Wall Street until I see it again. It reminded me a bit of when I saw Django Unchained last year (coincidentally another film released on Christmas day that has a great performance from Leonardo DiCaprio): here’s a film from one of my favorite American filmmakers, but something just felt off about it. The pacing felt all wrong at times in Tarantino’s film, but I chalked that up to the fact that it was, sadly, the first...

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