Max Borlund: Last News

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The title of Walter Hill’s “Dead for a Dollar” makes it sound like a spaghetti Western, and the picture opens with stunning vistas and a wistfully valorous neo-Morricone score that gives you the impression — maybe the hope — that it will be. It ends on a very different note: a series of titles explaining, with precise dates and details, what happened to each of the main characters, as if the film were based on a true story. It’s the “American Graffiti” gambit of treating fictional characters as though they were real, only in this case it ends up revealing something essential about the drama we’ve been watching. Namely, how it could be so avid, specific, and scrupulously carpentered…yet remote.

For many years now Venice has been a respectful platform for those big-name directors of the 1970s and early ’80s who are happy to go back into the fray long after those juicy studio budgets dried up: Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Paul Verhoeven, John Carpenter and — to a lesser extent — George Romero all found a home here for their late-period passion projects. Walter Hill, now 80, joins their ranks with an improbably youthful horse opera, and while it shows up the limitations of both writing and shooting a Western in the modern age (concessions to modern sensitivities have to be made, and digital cinematography somehow just doesn’t cut it with the subject matter), it’s nevertheless a wickedly enjoyable genre romp and full of violent surprises.

Carson Burton Walter Hill, the director behind “The Warriors” and “48 Hrs.,” is the recipient of the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award from this year’s Venice International Film Festival, Cartier and La Biennale di Venezia announced Friday. His new film, “Dead For a Dollar,” will premiere at the festival.“In the film world, one knows it’s a great honor to be invited for a special screening at the Venice Film Festival,” Hill said.

Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe are to star in 'Dead For a Dollar'. The pair have been cast in the Western helmed by legendary filmmaker Walter Hill as he gets behind the camera on a film for the first time in five years.