News

Welcome to The Best Movie You Never Saw, a column dedicated to examining films that have flown under the radar or gained traction throughout the years, earning them a place as a cult classic or underrated gem that was either before it’s time and/or has aged like a fine wine.

With this article, we’re taking a look back at the 1990 thriller Revenge, which was directed by the late, great Tony Scott. Since today – August 19th – marks the anniversary of Scott’s death, we felt this would be an appropriate time to dig into one of his lesser known films, and Revenge fits the bill, even though Quentin Tarantino (who wrote the Scott classic True Romance) has referred to this one as Scott’s masterpiece.

The Story: Michael Cochran (Kevin Costner) , a retired Naval aviator, visits his old friend, Tibey Mendez (Anthony Quinn) at his hacienda in Mexico,...

Ivan Passer’s superb coda to the ’60s counterculture generation now enjoys a formidable reputation; this new Fun City Editions release packs it with terrific extras. It may have the best performances by top stars John Heard, Jeff Bridges and Lisa Eichhorn. Disaffected 30-somethings in Santa Barbara investigate a murder and then try to blackmail a corporate CEO. Heard is the maimed, one-eyed veteran already judged unstable, Bridges the yacht bum who gets by on his good looks, and Eichhorn the most forlorn woman of the early ’80s, looking for a reason to give a damn about something. Jordan Cronenweth’s cinematography and Jack Nitzsche’s music track couldn’t be bettered; the movie deserves the place of honor granted to Easy Rider.

Cutter’s Way

Blu-ray

Fun City Editions

1981 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 109 min. / Street Date October 25, 2022 / Available from Vinegar Syndrome / 39.98

Starring Jeff Bridges, John Heard, Lisa Eichhorn, Ann Dusenberry,...

"Sorry, I just slashed my wrists." "Well, tape 'em!"  This is the aftermath of the '60s protest movement. Ivan Passer's riveting murder mystery of flakes and losers in sun-drenched, guilty Santa Barbara expresses the rage of radicals faced with the growing class divide, and the arrogance of the wealthy. Cutter's Way Blu-ray Twilight Time Limited Edition 1981 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 109 min. / Ship Date , 2016 / available through Twilight Time Movies / 29.95 Starring Jeff Bridges, John Heard, Lisa Eichhorn, Ann Dusenberry, Stephen Elliott, Arthur Rosenberg, Nina Van Pallandt. Cinematography Jordan Cronenweth Production Designer Josan F. Russo Film Editor Caroline Biggerstaff Original Music Jack Nitzsche Writing credits Jeffrey Alan Fiskin, from the novel Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg. Produced by Paul R. Gurian Directed by Ivan Passer

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Sort of the bad-news post-graduate version of American Graffiti, Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way is a movie with a mindset and background that I partly lived through,...

This story first appeared in the Feb. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Highbrows might scoff that Hollywood doesn't respect serious literature, but they obviously haven't discovered the biz's high-end rare-book scene. Johnny Depp collects first-edition works by Jack Kerouac, Arthur Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas and Edgar Allan Poe. Other industry figures have assembled museum-quality collections devoted to everything from exploration (producer Kathleen Kennedy) and aviation (director Tony Bill) to novelizations of silent-era films (business manager Bill Tanner) and the poetry of William Butler Yeats (screenwriter Jeffrey Fiskin). CAA is a particular fan of vintage

read more...

Three decades later, John Patterson still can't get enough of watching Jeff Bridges and John Heard try to avenge a murder in Cutter's Way

Thirty years on from its botched original release, Ivan Passer's note-perfect, sun-splashed neo-noir thriller Cutter's Way has slowly fought its way up from cult obscurity. As one of the lucky few who saw it then, and having loved it madly ever since, I couldn't be happier to see it available once more.

Released in 1981, it's like the last Hollywood movie of the 1960s, in which the aspirations and ideals of that long-gone decade finally soured irrevocably on its dazed, burnt-out survivors. It belongs alongside Karel Reisz's Who'll Stop The Rain (its perfect double-bill doppelganger), and Arthur Penn and Alan Sharpe's Night Moves – both visions of a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate American malaise.

Cutter's Way opens with a girl's corpse dumped in a trashcan in a rainswept Santa Barbara back alley,...

Exclusive: I've learned the rest of the Epix slate. Oscar winner David S. Ward, 3-time Oscar nominee Todd Field, and Emmy winners Todd Holland and Lawrence O'Donnell have signed original scripted comedy and drama development deals with this 4th place pay channel that's a joint venture among Viacom, Paramount, Lionsgate, and MGM. This follows previously announced deals with Oliver Stone for Still Holding and Larry Charles for ICon. The Supremes: David S. Ward (The Sting, co-writer of Sleepless in Seattle) joins Jeffrey Fiskin and Emmy winner Lawrence O’Donnell and Marie-Louise White developing this one-hour drama about a Supreme Court clerk and the ripple effect [...]...

My first screenwriting teacher at the Nyu film school was Patricia Cooper, who'd served as the highest female executive at a major studio at that time, overseeing big movies at Paramount in the '70s. She marched our class up to the Gulf & Western Building at Columbus Circle and sat us down in a screening room that resembled what I imagined a first-class airline compartment looked like, then showed us Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation."

As we gushed over it afterward, she praised the film but confessed to disappointment with the script. This was my first glimpse of major-league Hollywood story development.

My second teacher was Venable Herndon, co-author of Arthur Penn's "Alice's Restaurant." Venable's class was like some Reichian encounter group, but to get out of it in one piece, you didn't have to bare your primal wounds, only write a screenplay.

My third teacher was once-blacklisted Ian McLellan Hunter,...