Category: Starring Debuts

I’ve long acknowledged graduates from the Kelly McGillis Top Gun School of Absurd Roles and no one deserves a bigger pat on the back than Flashdance’s Alex Owens. I mean, name one other flick with a wannabe ballerina working as a welder in a Pennsylvanian steel mill. Not only that, but she appears to be…

Star Wars remains the dog’s bollocks, a bona fide pop culture phenomenon, and an astonishing exercise in world-building with its fucking cool light sabers, eye-melting hyperspace travel, hokey Jedi mind tricks, planet annihilation, and lovable stormtroopers, none of whom are capable of hitting a cow’s ass with a banjo. Only a retard can fail to…

Joe Spinell was a hemophiliac who bled to death in 1989 in his early fifties. Throughout his 17-year film career, he overwhelmingly played bit parts, but had an extraordinary knack for picking the right projects. We’re talking the first two Godfather and Rocky movies, as well as Taxi Driver, Sorcerer, and Cruising. Pretty good, huh?…

Comedians often suck when they try their luck on the big screen. They might be established stand-ups able to sell out 3,000-seater venues or a much-loved part of Saturday Night Live, but something invariably starts to stink during their feature-length stuff. To be fair, it’s very difficult for any performer to make consistently funny flicks.…

Perhaps the key scene in Neil LaBute’s caustic debut is the one in which business exec Chad (Eckhart) gets a junior colleague to expose himself. It’s during this brief humiliation that we grasp Company’s true interest: the increasingly unpleasant methods Chad will use to clamber over other men in the workplace. A fair chunk of…

There are wish fulfillment movies and then there’s the fucking Karate Kid. Macchio plays Daniel LaRusso, a wholesome, 17-year-old kid who’s arrived in LA with his upbeat mom. A five-strong gang of bullies, who’ve been taught ‘no mercy’ by their evil karate teacher, zero in. Well, big deal. Daniel still gets the buxom, high-class girl…

That arch wit Morrissey obviously knows a thing or two about holidaying in dismal seaside towns. Just listen to the brilliant Everyday is Like Sunday in which he dreamily yearns for such places to be bombed: This is the coastal town that they forgot to close down. Armageddon, come Armageddon! Come, Armageddon, come! Everyday is…

Look, I’m not gay. Yes, I love The Wizard of Oz and did once find myself in a gay nightclub via a drunken youthful mistake, but don’t go trying to give me all that lady doth protest too much shit. I’m not gay. All right? Saying that, I must confess to a sneaking admiration for…

It’s apt that Herbert West (Combs) resembles both Harry Potter and Scottish necrophile Dennis Nilsen. His small stature and precocious schoolboy looks suggest he’s harmless, enabling him to obscure a deep-rooted fascination with corpses while committing murder if necessary. It’s a plum role, all right, and Combs seizes it with such memorable relish that he…

You know Alan Rickman’s done his job remarkably well in Die Hard when he plunges to his death from a high-rise building and we feel a bit sad. Unlike Kong, it wasn’t beauty that killed the charismatic beast, but a combination of old-fashioned greed and sheer bad luck. Rickman plays Hans Gruber, a debonair German…