Films featuring
Billy Bob Thornton

Tombstone

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Tombstone was the first shot fired in a double-barreled blast of Wyatt Earp movies in 1993 and 1994. While Lawrence Kasdan and Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp was too long, plodding and ponderous, George Pan Cosmato’s entry in the O.K. Corral sweepstakes was violent and operatic, a noisy revenge tale told at a fever pitch. It was also the better movie, even if its fidelity to the facts of Earp’s life was less than letter perfect. Movie audiences have never been that picky about historical accuracy in their westerns. Young Guns did all right and it was hardly a scholarly work on the life of Billy the Kid.

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The Ice Harvest

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Modern film noir isn’t the easiest style to successfully bring off, at least not without appearing overly cute or self-conscious about it. This blood-soaked mix of dark humor and double cross manages to navigate that minefield without making the audience look at their watches until the end credits roll.

The last film to so adroitly combine noir elements, ironic humor and a byzantine plot was Wild Things and The Ice Harvest is good deal less trashy and more sophisticated than that potboiler.

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Friday Night Lights

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I went to high school at Servite in Anaheim, California, which was about as football crazy as a school gets in Southern California. Football crazy in California, however, is to football crazy in Texas as Presbyterians are to Pentecostals. This movie is about a little town in West Texas where, if the Second Coming happened on any given Friday night during the fall, the locals would likely say to Jesus, “Hold your horses there. Don’t You know there’s a football game on?”

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