If Jason Bognacki had focused his undeniable give for arresting visuals while making MARK OF THE WITCH (aka ANOTHER), he would have made a poetically disturbing film about the sins of the parents being visited on their children. Instead, he has cobbled long swaths of irksome exposition into a horror film that grows tedious before… Read More »
THE NICE GUYS
Shane Black has the gift of making films that are nail-bitingly suspenseful and wickedly funny at the same time. He did it with KISS KISS BANG BANG, and he’s done it again with THE NICE GUYS, a stylishly acerbic and decidedly hard-boiled neo-Noir pitting nihilism against idealism during the candy-colored decadence of 1977 Los Angeles.… Read More »
THE DARKNESS
THE DARKNESS, released without a press screening, and on Friday the Thirteenth, is everything you’d expect. It’s a tame and insultingly derivative version of POLTERGEIST, right down to the sulky teenage daughter and the darling little kid who sees spirits. That the little kid is a boy, not a blond cherub of a girl, and… Read More »
MONEY MONSTER
A film that finds a logical reason for the police to shoot a show host on live television, and makes the reason for shooting said host to be for the host’s own good, is a film that is not entirely devoid of interest. MONEY MONSTER is such a film, and this is a good thing, because… Read More »
X-MEN: APOCALYPSE
X-MEN APOCALYPSE is as big and bold as a special effect-laden action-adventure flick should be. It’s also audacious enough to make the story about more than leveling the planet or finding new ways to decapitate people. As with the best in this series from the Marvel Comics universe, the real enemy is the lethal combination… Read More »
BLING
BLING is a perfectly sweet, perfectly gentle, and perfectly harmless bit of fluffy animated comedy that will delight kids whose ages fall in the single digits. True love is the theme, and the difficulties of overcoming both self-doubt and Oscar (Jason Kravitz), an evil supervillain, provide the obstacles as mechanical whiz-kid Sam (Taylor Kitsch) spends… Read More »
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR asks the cinematic question “What would happen if we took a whole passel of superheroes from the Marvel Comic universe and tossed them together into one film?” But wait, what if we pitted them against one another over a fundamental difference of opinion about ethics, and then added a dash (or… Read More »
PAPA: HEMINGWAY IN CUBA
The greatest virtue of PAPA: HEMINGWAY IN CUBA is that it was filmed in Cuba just after it was re-opened to the United States. It still looks the way it did over 50 years ago, when the story is set, which not too long before the United States embargo, protesting Castro’s revolution, went into place.… Read More »
GREEN ROOM
THE GREEN ROOM is technically flawless. Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier has crafted a horror film that plays upon the well-chosen phobias about extremists, backwoods rough justice, and the down side of the music business. Yet, for all the graphic flourishes of dog-mangled throats, a close-up belly slitting, and the results of gunfire meeting flesh, this is… Read More »
A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING
Tom Hanks once again reminds us that he is the quintessential American Everyman with a deeply affecting turn as the symbol of modern American enterprise in A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING, based on the novel of the same name by Dave Eggers, and adapted by Tom Tykwer. Think of it as an updated version of… Read More »
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