Actor · 1950

Brad Dourif

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

Heaven's Gate

Michael Cimino · 1980

Michael Cimino’s 1980 Western Heaven’s Gate, starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken, is a visually sumptuous but narratively austere epic loosely based on the Johnson County War. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond and scored by David Mansfield, it attempts to render class conflict as landscape and duration. Though reviled on release for its cost and length, later reappraisals treat it as a landmark of directorial conviction — flawed, forbidding, and formally uncompromising.

13:00

Wise Blood

John Huston · 1979

John Huston’s 1979 film Wise Blood adapts Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel with formal precision and moral gravity. Brad Dourif stars as Hazel Motes, a war veteran who founds an atheistic church only to spiral into self-annihilation. Shot in Georgia with Gerry Fisher’s subdued cinematography and Alex North’s sparse score, the film sustains a tone of grave absurdity, refusing psychological explanation or redemptive closure. Its power lies in its fidelity to O’Connor’s vision: belief and unbelief as equally binding, the body as theological text, and the American South as a landscape saturated with inherited conviction.

13:00

Blue Velvet

David Lynch · 1986

David Lynch followed the disaster of Dune with a $6m film he was left almost entirely alone to make, trading a pay cut for final cut. Kyle MacLachlan's amateur sleuth spies on Isabella Rossellini's abused nightclub singer and runs into Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth, and the American town around them turns out to hide as much as either of them.

13:00

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Miloš Forman · 1975

Miloš Forman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel puts Jack Nicholson's disruptive new patient against Louise Fletcher's controlled head nurse inside the Oregon State Hospital, an operating psychiatric facility used as the actual set. Made for $3 million after a development history stretching back to 1962, it became one of only three films to sweep the top five Academy Awards, and it still plays as a study of institutional control rather than a simple underdog story.