If Michael Bay is smart, and having a long career as, essentially, a one-trick pony, leads us to believe he must be, he will cast Olivia Stambouliah in all his films from now on. As Lieutenant Dhazghig, the crack surveillance officer in charge of keeping track of where the rogue, and eponymous subject of Bay’s… Read More »
UNCHARTED
UNCHARTED is like the first pitch meeting to potential financiers, which is odd since it’s been in development for almost a decade. What we have here is the broad outline of a plot full of twists, turns, and aerial stunts. What we don’t have is any sense of order or logic, even that of the… Read More »
WRATH OF MAN
In WRATH OF MAN, we find Jason Statham and Guy Ritchie re-united in a film about the imperative of family values and the dangers of boredom. The result is a bloody wonderland of moral relativity and of an honor system that has nothing to do with Testaments Old or New. While is doesn’t give Mr.… Read More »
OCEAN’S 8
So maybe you have a film franchise that is running out of steam. Maybe one of the stars wants out. Maybe his character was killed off to accommodate that. Maybe an actress has an idea for reviving that franchise with some panache and a dash of ovarian power. You can’t help thinking that one of… Read More »
AMERICAN ANIMALS — Bart Layton Interview
Click here to listen to the interview. Click here for the full review of AMERICAN ANIMALS. Bart Layton’s background is in documentaries, and so when he came to make AMERICAN ANIMALS, he integrated that genre into the narrative structure of his film. The result is nothing short of scathingly brilliant, and is the progenitor of… Read More »
AMERICAN ANIMALS
Click here to listen to the interview with Bart Layton. At a pivotal moment in Bart Layton’s emotionally charged AMERICAN ANIMALS, a character looks out of the car in which he is riding and sees the real person on whom he is based staring back at him as the car glides by. It’s not a… Read More »
LOGAN LUCKY
Transposing the milieu from glitz to grits, Steven Soderbergh’s LOGAN LUCKY does more set an intricate heist flick in the backroads of Appalachia, it also makes a sly statement about class, culture, and our preconceived notions about those two things. It also has something that most Soderbergh films lack for all their visual impact: heart.… Read More »
NOW YOU SEE ME 2
The best caper films keep us guessing even while we’re watching the caper in progress. In that way, NOW YOU SEE ME 2 succeeds admirably. The return of the The Horsemen, a band of underground magicians dedicated to truth, justice, and outsmarting everyone around them, including each other, provides several set pieces that are fine… Read More »
FEMME FATALE
There was a time when Brian De Palma was hailed as the worthy successor to Alfred Hitchcock. With DRESSED TO KILL, he seemed to have slipped a bit, from successor to Hitchcock into the role of paying tribute to him with a dead-on homage style of filmmaking. And then with BLOW OUT, well, he just sort of… Read More »
PARKER
Patton Oswalt once opined that Jason Statham can make any movie better. He is not wrong. For those who have succumbed to Mr. Stathams particular appeal as a cool and deadly action hero, his charisma is an umbrella over the rougher patches of all but the most cretinous scripts. In PARKER, he has found a… Read More »