Simon's Movie Reviews

  Heat (1995) is a crime movie in which screen legends Al Pacino and Robert De Niro shared the screen for the first time. That alone should be good enough to guarantee near perfection. Fortunately, this is also a Michael Mann movie featuring some crackling dialogue and action choreography that makes the audience feel like they are right in the streets amid the gunfight. The result is a movie so good it influenced a slew of other crime movies in its wake, including Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight . My first viewing of Heat was sometime in the mid-2000s when I watched it the old-fashioned way by renting it from the video store. I did not know much about it other than it was a crime movie starring Pacino and DeNiro, and upon first viewing I thought there were a few lengthy moments in between the action scenes. Having recently viewed it again, I have more appreciation for the scenes when the bullets aren’t flying because those quieter scenes do a good job of establishing the cha...

War movies make for great entertainment, but war in real life is horrible. Other than maybe David Ayer’s Fury , no movie proves this point better than Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), which portrayed the horror of World War II so accurately veterans walked out of the theatres because they felt it was too realistic. Prior to this movie Hollywood had made tales of that war filled heroism, humour, and a moderate level of violence. Spielberg’s film may somewhat overdo it with the American heroism, but it certainly doesn’t avoid the violence, and the laughs are very rare. Spielberg has often been the king of summer movies, and Saving Private Ryan was another major hit for him in the summer of 1998. I went to see it in theatres with my parents during a vacation in Quebec City even though this was clearly not a family movie. I believe I was around 12 years old at the time, so there are plenty of images that became seared in my brain, particularly the early carnage of Omah...