Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade

I read in the papers that we're living in a great period of fantasy films, made possible by the tremendous breakthroughs in special effects technology and the soaring imaginations of a new generation of American filmmakers. But scratch a Star Wars or a Close Encounters and what you find is the same old realism: a linear, cause-and-effect story line

The movie is thoroughly a product of Seventies sensibility: the integrity of things as they already stand, the presentation of a text as a concrete object, and out-front admission of the means of production.

Death, violence, and moral corruption aren't just slapstick props in these films, but agonizingly real presences, and their comedy isn't a release from horror but a confrontation with it.