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"River's Edge" was one of the most important independent films of the 1980s. Directed by Tim Hunter from a screenplay by Neil Jimenez, it tells the soul-deadening story of a group of teens who cover for their friend after he murders another of their friends. What makes the movie especially disturbing is the teens' indifference; when they're taken to view the nude corpse, which the killer has dumped at the title location, most of them gaze at it with a galling lack of emotion.

"River's Edge" earned raves from critics and won Best Picture at the 1988 Independent Spirit Awards. It launched the careers of Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye, and Daniel Roebuck, and went a long way toward spurring Dennis Hopper's late '80s comeback. It is a scathing experience, one that leaves such an indelible mark you need not revisit it. You'll never shake the image of Danyi Deats...

In 2021, Wesley Snipes used an Esquire "What I've Learned" column to make a fascinating confession: "I've got to learn how to be a movie star."

Snipes was 58 at the time of the article's publication, and enjoying a career renaissance due to his portrayal of actor-director D'Urville Martin in Craig Brewster's uproarious "Dolemite Is My Name." Though he'd officially made his comeback as an aging gang leader in Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq" four years prior, Martin was the perfect vehicle through which Snipes could examine the frustration of an ambitious artist shunted from A-list roles to low-aiming exploitation flicks.

Snipes' Martin is a bitter, alcoholic filmmaker trying, and failing miserably, to make nightclub comic Rudy Ray Moore (Eddie Murphy) look like a Blaxploitation action star on par with Richard Roundtree. Martin is a defeated man, and it's hard not to sense Snipes reckoning with the sun setting on his own action-hero stardom.

Hollywood was in the midst of its Brat Pack fervor when the director/screenwriter team of Tim Hunter and Neil Jimenez jolted moviegoers with "River's Edge." It was the grimy, dead-souled antithesis to John Hughes' peppy tales of suburban woe. The Northern California high schoolers in Hunter's film are dead-enders who, aware of their paltry worth to society, have little value for human life. When their friend John (Daniel Roebuck) claims he's murdered his girlfriend Jamie (Danyi Deats) and takes them to see her nude corpse, which he's discarded like a dog toy next to a riverbank, they do not recoil in horror. They are at most dumbstruck, and at worst eager to aid John in covering up the crime.

We should be shocked by their lack of revulsion, but Hunter lets us hang out with these kids for a good 15 minutes before taking us to Jamie. They're future burnouts...

Neil Jimenez, who won three Indie Spirit Awards for writing River’s Edge and writing and co-directing The Waterdance, has died. He was 62. His sister, Kathleen Serio, said Jimenez died December 11 of heart failure in Arroyo Grande, CA.

Jimenez won his first Spirit Award in 1988 for his screenplay to River’s Edge, the Tim Hunter-directed thriller whose stacked cast included Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye and Dennis Hopper. The 1986 pic about a group of California friends who get ensnarled in a murder and cover-up also won Best Feature at the Spirits that year and was a nominee for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

The Sacramento native went on to pen or co-write the scripts for Where the River Runs Black (1986) and The Dark Wind (1991) and the story for Bette Midler period drama For the Boys (1991). Jimenez’s next project was The Waterdance, which starred Eric Stoltz as...