300

Both the comic book by author Frank Miller and director Snyder's cinematic adaptation are bloodthirsty affairs for ex-sanguinary times. Onscreen, buoyed up to and past Mount Olympus by some of the most flawlessly integrated visual effects yet created and a script that takes itself, as it should, very seriously, 300 is an action-film lover's wet, crimson dream, awash in spectacle and set to a terrific, rumbling score by Tyler Bates. Not since Mario Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World has Greco-Roman movie-house mythmaking been so thoroughly well-conceived and executed. Cinematographer Larry Fong brings Miller's visceral, instantly identifiable splash pages to bloody life and loses none of the author's trademark visual kineticism in the transfer from page to screen. It's notable that these 300 bearded die-hards, attempting to repel shockingly awesome numbers of foreign usurpers, resemble nothing so much as an intractable insurgency willing to sacrifice everything up to and including their own lives.