Film narration carries the dubious reputation of being a fallback trick for lesser directors, a device to trot out when other more classically visual narrative devices fail. In the same way that long, unbroken takes supposedly signify expertise, the use of narration often serves lazy critics with an easy indication that the director has lost the plot. Still, even the most anti-narration snob would have to concede that the larger film canon contains some pretty notable exceptions to this rule. The Naked City, A Clockwork Orange, Sunset Boulevard, GoodFellas, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Big Lebowski, The Shawshank Redemption — all use narration, and far from stalling story or characterization, with them it pushes everything forward.
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He’s stared down the Terminator, tangled with aliens, and faced off against Doc Holliday with nary a glimmer of fear, so suffice to say Michael Biehn’s no stranger to playing hardened, iconic screen bad asses. (Think Biehn’s played tough? Just wait and see him mean, nasty, and unraveling at the seams in this week’s apocalyptic horror The Divide, a film whose production was reportedly a nightmare in itself.) But early on, Biehn says, he wasn’t so sure how serious he should be about acting – that is, until he saw Robert De Niro in a riveting classic role that convinced him that this was his calling.
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What's Martin Scorsese's best film? His worst? And where do the rest -- excluding his music video for "Bad," his episode of Amazing Stories and the collaborative documentary Street Scenes -- fall in between? The answers are obvious:
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