Ray Liotta Archives - Movie SmackdownÂ®

Killing Them Softly (2012) vs True Romance (1993)

Killing Them Softly (2011) vs. True Romance (1993)

November 29, 2012 Eric Volkman 0

The players in our two battling movies this review are gun-toting rogues, so weâ€™ll have to let them shoot it out across the room while we duck under the tables. Armed and lethal in the challengerâ€™s corner is Killing Them Softly, a dark, moody crime drama featuring Brad Pitt as a hit man tasked with eliminating the crew that robbed an illicit card game. That film points its barrel at the breezily violent cult hit, True Romance, with Christian Slater as a comic book store clerk whose involvement with a hooker leads him to murder and a high-risk drug deal.

Both films rely on humanizing their criminals with generous amounts of tangential dialogue, and both also lean heavily on music and artsy cinematography to set a pop, breezy tone in counterpoint to some pretty brutal action by their principals. […]

Argo (2012) vs. The Last Shot (2004)

October 11, 2012 Arthur Tiersky 0

So let’s talk about movie movies.

First, youâ€™ve got your movies about movies, which range from the beloved classics (Sunset Blvd., Singin’ in the Rain) to the cult oddities (Barton Fink, The Stunt Man) to the amusing trifles (Bowfinger) to the less-said-the-better (Hollywood Ending).

Then youâ€™ve got your movies that sort of know they’re movies, i.e., meta-movies, a diverse genre that includes such intriguing experiments as Adaptation and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.

Then there’s the movie-within-movie movies, notable entries being Kiss of the Spider Woman, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Almodovar’s Bad Education. […]