‘And the Sea Will Grant Each Man New Hope, As Sleep Brings Dreams of Home’: John McTiernan’s ‘The Hunt for Red October’
By Tim Pelan There is a long and noble history in Hollywood of submarine war films. The two most recent examples that spring to…
Tim Pelan
“If You’re Going to Sell Your Soul to The Devil, the Consequences Are There for You to Suffer”: Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Counselor’
By Tim Pelan Not much of a one for describing his work, author Cormac McCarthy bluntly describes The Counselor, his first original screenplay, knocked…
“No One Is Just Anything”: In William Friedkin’s ‘Sorcerer’, Four Reduced Men Must Gamble with Life to Give It Value
By Tim Pelan The film became an obsession. It was to be my magnum opus, the one on which I’d stake my reputation. I…
40 Years of Hurt, Face-Hugging Dreams of Breathing: Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’
By Tim Pelan Ripley’s words to the Xenomorph in Alien 3 sum up how we all feel: “You’ve been in my life so long,…
Noir Cut to Look of the Period, Not About the Period: The Sunny, Seedy ’50’s Underbelly of Curtis Hanson’s ‘L.A. Confidential’
By Tim Pelan I came to it because of Ellroy. When I read ‘L.A. Confidential,’ I just got hooked on the characters, got caught…
In Search of Our Better Selves: The Rebirth, Redemption and Road Warriors of George Miller’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’
By Tim Pelan I just watched ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ again last week, and I tell you I couldn’t direct 30 seconds of that….
The Greater the Truth, the Greater the Damage: ‘The Insider’, Michael Mann’s White-Collar Thrill Ride of Corporate Malfeasance
By Tim Pelan You pay me to go get guys like Wigand, to draw him out. To get him to trust us, to get…
The Matrix Revelation: How the Wachowskis Opened Our Eyes to a New Kind of Action Cinema
By Tim Pelan Few films permeate the gestalt consciousness like Star Wars (“I am your father”, “Use the Force” and so on) but in…
Slaughterhouse Twelve: Robert Aldrich’s ‘The Dirty Dozen’
By Tim Pelan In the mid-1960s, director Robert Aldrich was coming up for air after the thick stew melodramas of Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and…
An Agency of Chaos: Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’
By Tim Pelan In October 2005, shortly after his groundbreaking and seemingly stand-alone Batman Begins was completed, writer/director/producer Christopher Nolan ruminated. “You know, I…