Frank Darabont made this four years before Shawshank -- and in some ways it's the better film. Not the more celebrated one. The better one.
Shawshank gives you archetypes: the innocent man, the corrupt warden, the redemptive friendship. It's beautifully made and completely airless. Everyone in it exists to illustrate a theme.
Buried Alive gives you people. Clint isn't a symbol -- he's a man who trusts too much, builds things with his hands, goes fishing with the sheriff, and…

There are no women in this film. Not one.

The military world here is raised to grotesque: goose-stepping soldiers, bayonets, officers drunk on rank, men reduced to mannequins of obedience. Suffocating and deliberately so.

The Desert of the Tartars is a film about waiting --- for an enemy that may never come, for a war that may never arrive, for a meaning that recedes with every year spent at the fort.

The closest comparison in feeling a Soviet children's tale…

Yesterday I watched Of Unknown Origin (1983) by George P. Cosmatos. It deeply shook me -- because I went through almost the exact same story, in every detail.

A huge rat settled in my basement. It destroyed all my stored pumpkins, carrots, and potatoes, and dug massive burrows in what was still an earthen floor at the time. I fought it for a week, and I found myself in the same kind of obsessive, feverish state that Peter Weller’s character…

Barbet Schroeder made a film more honest than its subject deserved -- and its subject is Bukowski, who deserved exactly that.

The drinking here isn't a social problem with a root cause and a twelve-step solution. It's a border. A way of staying human inside a system designed to grind the poet out of you. Chinaski drinks to remain himself -- not to escape, but to resist.

Fight Club has the same skeleton and none of the soul. Its rebellion…