Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1984, 118 mins. Digital Projection. With Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Jonathan Ke Quan. The second installment in the ongoing saga of cinema’s handsomest archaeologist-adventurer, a prequel set a few years prior to Raiders of the Lost Ark, lands Dr. Jones in the northern reaches of the Indian subcontinent in the service of a group of villagers under threat by a bloodthirsty religious cult. To this day, it’s the most violent and controversial entry in the series, while also being one of Spielberg’s most purely kinetic films, a thrill ride rocketing from one grotesquely imagined image to the next.