Swelter tries hard to be an edgy contemporary Western , but it falls very, very short of its goal. This heist film stars Lennie James as a former professional thief turned small-town sheriff who is hunted down by his former breth

Both of these films seemed to recognize that Nazis make for fantastic villains in the Indiana Jones franchise. However, Raiders of the Lost Ark just succeeds a little more in making their villains truly despica

Along the way, the pair cross paths with one bizarre character after another, including a drug dealer portrayed by a young McConaughey. Cheesy and dull, Scorpion Spring tries to be way too big for its britc

The Last Crusade has some memorable villains but they're all just a little too cliché without any real personality. Raiders of the Lost Ark makes Belloq a more complex bad guy while the Nazi officer Toht was a frightening yet weaselly henchman who you couldn't wait to see get his comeuppa

Even though it's a small scene, Molina's role in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights is absolutely unforgettable. As the coked-out drug dealer Rahad Jackson, Molina gives a performance that is unhinged, hilarious, and inte

He seems genuinely excited about the work, which we come to learn is inspired by his father's teachings. This makes the final journey to find the Holy Grail all the more satisfying as Indy and his father both us their knowledge to escape the traps, beat the bad guys and find the true

After leaping a bottomless chasm, avoiding spikes in the walls and outrunning a rolling boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark 's opening sequence, Indiana Jones loses the golden statue to his long-time rival, René Belloq. Played by Paul Freeman, Belloq is one of Raiders ' triptych of antagonists, but whereas the bulk of the villainy is brought by the Nazis, this fallen archeologist strikes closer to home. He and Indy have a past, and find their ideological dispute writ large as they hunt for the eponymous artifact. Freeman's cool Frenchman is a key ingredient in what makes Raiders such an enduring

Re-watching Raiders in 2021 feels like you're watching a movie that could've been released last year. This longevity can greatly be attributed to the fact that a majority of the film is made practically, using real sets, locations, and stunt

One of my favorite scenes in all of movie history is the scene in the valley where he's about to destroy it, and you get that amazing speech about the ark and humanity passing through history. I just want to dive into that: how it was written, how you approached it on set, what direction you were given. I'd love to just learn a bit more about that sc

This feature of John Logan's play about abstract artist Mark Rothko sees Molina taking center stage as the complicated, aging painter. Set over 1958 and 1959, the play traces Rothko's relationship with his assistant as he works on large commercial pieces for the Four Seasons ho

Molina plays the doctor in the desert village where James's character Bishop resides, and Bishop's long-Lost Ark Crafting Guide buds are played by the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Grant Bowler. Swelter fails to deliver anything new, different, or compell

Like many movies of its era, there are some aspects of Steven Spielberg’s action-adventure classic Raiders of the Lost Ark that haven’t aged particularly gracefully. For starters, it’s revealed that the hero first began his relationship with the love interest when she was still underage, which would absolutely not fly with today's audien

Raiders can almost be interpreted as a revenge fantasy. Indy punches his way through legions of Nazis and a bunch of them are gruesomely killed by divine intervention when the Ark is opened, positioning Raiders as a staunchly anti-fascist mo

A lot of modern action movies – including the most recent Indiana Jones movie – tend to opt for CGI, but before that was an option, action filmmakers had to stage their set pieces for real with incredibly skilled stunt teams. Raiders of the Lost Ark is full of breathtaking practical stunt w

A couple of moments in Raiders push the boundaries of its PG-13 rating – particularly the climactic sequence in which a couple of the bad guys’ faces melt off their skulls due to the awesome power of the Ark. The face-melting effect is still terrifying after all these ye

Both films do an exceptional job of delivering thrilling action sequences . With ambitious set-pieces and largely practical effects, these movies are still exciting to revisit today and marvel at what the filmmakers were able to pull

As the children who have grown up loving Indy have aged, so too has their ability to peel away at some of the series' racially problematic elements. One of these elements is the insensitive makeup jobs of various characters, seen in set-pieces like the bar gunfight in Nepal and the Cairo ch

In the Bible, the Ark is passed down to the Jewish people by God, so the Nazis’ theft of it can be seen as a metaphor for the anti-Semitic atrocities of World War II, which Spielberg later explored in more depth in Schindler’s Li