MOVIE REVIEW: Days of Heaven (1978)

If Badlands showed the promise of Terrence Malick's career with a remarkably unique "lovers on the run" crime film, 1978's Days of Heaven is where the director really started to find his style that would only continue to evolve with each subsequent film. Many of the director's trademarks - such as the painterly cinematography, beautifully composed musical scores, an emphasis on the natural world and how it overshadows human beings, etc - are placed at the forefront in this film, whereas they were comparatively minimized in his feature debut. The film opens with a title sequence that immediately sets the tone for the film, using the song "Aquarium" by French composer Camille Saint-Saens to evoke an ethereal atmosphere that will hang over the remainder of the picture. This sequence also informs the audience with a sense of the time period that the story takes place in, showing photographs of the American working class as well as Woodrow Wilson during his presidency, indicating that this is set not long after the turn of the century.

MOVIE REVIEW: Chimes at Midnight (1965)

For a man who made what is considered by many critics, film historians and filmmakers around the world to be the greatest movie of all time, Orson Welles had one of the strangest and most unfortunate careers in the annals of film history. He essentially started out on top with his debut feature, 1941's Citizen Kane, which he wrote, directed and starred in at the age of 26. It was the first and only time in his career that he would get complete creative control on his work, and as the decades wore on he eventually found himself cast out of the Hollywood studio system and instead relying on international markets for funding. In the mid-1960s, Welles went to Europe to find funding for a project that he had previously produced on stage. Chimes at Midnight was the name of the project he dreamed of putting on film, a combination of various Shakespearean texts (including "Henry IV Parts I and II", "Henry V", and "The Merry Wives of Windsor") that centered on the character Sir John Falstaff, a comic figure who was the companion to Prince Hal (Keith Baxter) in the years before his eventual reign as King Henry V.

MOVIE REVIEW: Badlands (1973)

Terrence Malick based his feature film debut on an unusual story that took place in the 1950s. Loosely based on the real-life crimes of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, a young couple who went on a killing spree that took the lives of eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming. They were eventually arrested, with Fugate serving 17 years in prison before being released in the mid-1970s, whereas Starkweather was sentenced to death by electric chair a year and a half after being taken in by authorities. It's the kind of "lovers on the lam" story that was seen in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, as well as being a direct influence on later films such as Tony Scott's True Romance, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Dominic Sena's Kalifornia. Each of these films tend to put a greater deal of focus on the violence in the crimes that were committed, with Tony Scott and Oliver Stone's films using violence in a particularly stylish manner. What separates Malick's film, however, is how it subverts conventions of the crime genre by using a tone that would be fitting for a children's story. That sentence alone will probably raise more than a few eyebrows to anyone who has never seen this film, but it's this surreal quality that makes the film so unique and memorable.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Terminator (1984)

With the upcoming release of Terminator Genisys just around the corner, I decided to revisit James Cameron's 1984 original that started the iconic science fiction series. I've lost count of how many times I've seen this film over the years, spanning different home video formats that include VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and even a theatrical screening to celebrate the film's 30th anniversary. Needless to say, I am a pretty big fan of the film and consider it to be one of the highlights in Cameron's long and successful career in Hollywood.

Made on a relatively low budget at $6.4 million, the film's story is fairly simple: In the year 2029, a cyborg assassin (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back to Los Angeles in the year 1984 in order to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose son will become the leader of the resistance in the future war against the machines. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) is a member of that resistance who is also sent back from the year 2029 in order to protect Sarah Connor from the cyborg assassin known as the Terminator. As Sarah eventually learns from Reese, the Terminator is an unstoppable force that cannot be dealt or bargained with in any conventional terms, which results in a relentless chase that puts the two protagonists in the cross-hairs of Schwarzenegger's unstoppable antagonist throughout the duration of the film's 107 run time.