Watch ‘Fugitive’ director Andrew Davis live on the Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown
Week 14: Times readers chose ‘The Fugitive,’ directed by Andrew Davis, as their favorite in the Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown.
Times readers chose “The Fugitive” as their favorite film in Week 14 of the Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown.
Join “Fugitive” director Andrew Davis and film critic Justin Chang at 6 p.m. today (Aug. 13) for a livestream chat about the movie and its enduring appeal. Watch the video on the Los Angeles Times Classic Hollywood Facebook Page. Or tune in on Twitter or YouTube.
Davis’ action-thriller stars Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble, a man who goes on the run after being wrongly accused of killing his wife. “The Fugitive” opened Aug. 6, 1993 and became the year’s third highest-grossing film. Tommy Lee Jones won the supporting actor Oscar for his performance as a U.S. marshal on Kimble’s trail.
This week, Chang wrote about why “The Fugitive” is a great summer movie and a love letter to Chicago. He notes that the film “gave us a far less conventional, more off-the-beaten-path view of the city than the movies had really given us before.”
“[T]hink of ‘The Fugitive,’ a Hitchcockian wrong-man thriller predicated on the beautifully simple ground rule that Kimble must always be just a few steps ahead — not 10 steps ahead, just a few, enough to maintain a steadily pulsing tension while also allowing you to delight in his every hairsbreadth escape, his on-the-fly resourcefulness,” Chang says. “It’s an enormously durable conceit, of course, as evidenced by ‘The Fugitive’s’ original roots in a 1960s TV show and its recent reincarnation as a Quibi series starring Kiefer Sutherland.”
The Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown is the L.A. Times series where each week readers vote on the greatest summer films of all time. Or at least since 1975, the year that “Jaws” forever changed the landscape of moviemaking, gross tallying and beach bumming forever.
To recap the rules: Each week Chang presents readers with a list of movies from 1975 to 2019, all of which were released during a particular summer time frame. Since May readers have been voting for their favorites on his Twitter account @justincchang.
What’s next: For weeks 15 and 16, readers chose “Stand by Me” and “Apocalypse Now.” Now we’re taking all 16 winning films and pitting them against each other in a final round of Twitter polls to determine the Ultimate Ultimate Summer Movie. The polls open at 8 a.m. PT Monday at Chang’s Twitter account.
We’ll recap the results on our final live showdown at 6 p.m. PT Thursday, Aug. 20, on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Week 13: ‘Mission: Impossible — Fallout’ director Christopher McQuarrie joins a live chat from London about the blockbuster franchise.
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