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 »
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 »
LOUDER THAN BOMBS
LOUDER THAN BOMBS begins with a perfect picture of family love. Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) is marveling at his newborn as his wife Amy, (Megan Ketch) looks on beaming. Jonah is beaming, too, and he is aghast that he has forgotten to bring his wife the food she had requested when she discovered that the hospital tray… Read More »
CRIMINAL
CRIMINAL is a trifle of a thriller. Sure, guns are fired, things explode, and Ryan Reynolds meets a grisly end shortly after the flick begins, but the necessary tension to keep us all on the edge of our seats is noticeably lacking. What we are left with is an intriguing premise, Gary Oldman at his… Read More »
MIDNIGHT SPECIAL
MIDNIGHT SPECIAL is a film that plays with its audience’s sense of normality. Beginning in the conventional and slowly, almost imperceptibly, moving us from the quotidian drama of a kidnapped child and a father’s unconditional love, into a boldly unconventional consideration of that elusive point where science and spirituality merge. There is nothing predictable here,… Read More »
TOO LATE
Kierkegaard, noted Existentialist and proto-Absurdist, once opined that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. As a cinematic exploration of the tragic and comedic implications of that, there is Dennis Hauck’s wistful neo-Noir, TOO LATE, a film that employs a strategic insouciance as it nimbly plays with the time/space continuum… Read More »
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE
For most of BATMAN V SUPERMAN’s bloviated pretension, I was merely bored. This half-baked idea studded with ponderous pronouncements, shockingly sedate action sequences, and the simulacrum of serious philosophical inquiry plodded along, weighed down by an overstuffed plot and an underdeveloped narrative. But when we arrived at a meticulous recreation of the deposition from the… Read More »
THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN (Zhì qu weihu shan)
THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN has blood, guts, and sentiment. Based on actual events, and on the novel by Bo Qu, it’s a sweeping epic of a war film set in northwest China just after World War II has ended, when the government has collapse into corruption, bandits are terrorizing the villages, and the People’s… Read More »
THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT
As is the wont with these franchises based on young adult novels, THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT, the third in the series, begins where the last one left off. No flashback montage, no character narration bringing us up to date. Instead, there’s just a quick reminder that Jeanine is dead, and that everyone on screen is… Read More »
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