Tag: Renny Harlin

December 12, 2016 / / Main Slate Archive

Who is the real Samantha Caine? It’s the question that looms over The Long Kiss Goodnight, the 1996 shoot-em-up written by Shane Black and directed by Renny Harlin. For eight long years, Samantha (Geena Davis) has wondered this every time she looks in the mirror and sees a body riddled with scars she doesn’t remember getting. Is she just another mousy, small-town schoolteacher and mother who heads the PTA or was she once another kind of woman entirely?

With the help of a private eye (Samuel Jackson) — the cheapest one her money can buy — she hopes to finally learn just who that woman was that she kissed goodnight all those years ago. Only now, she doesn’t have much of a choice: she has to figure it out fast, because the clock is ticking and her dark past is about to determine the outcome of her future.

December 15, 2015 / / Main Slate Archive

DIE HARD is perhaps one of, if not the most, critically lauded action films. Made during a glut of intense shoot-em-up action vehicles ranging from the excellent FIRST BLOOD (1982) to the considerably less excellent DEADLY PREY (1987), DIE HARD broke from the pack by being an incredibly compelling scrappy and tense action thriller. At a time when the dominant approach to action films was spectacle and scale, DIE HARD differentiated itself by being relatively low-key and deriving Hitchcockian suspense from intimate moments and normal situations.