Comedy

The Delinquents (2023) Movie Review

Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents is not a heist film, but it does begin with an elaborate bank robbery. It is not exactly a thriller, either, though it borrows from plenty of the tropes you’d find in an exciting thriller film with a heist as its centerpiece. Elaborate planning, blackmail, prison politics, uneasy partnerships, paranoia of…

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Comedy

Burn After Reading – Precious Bodily Fluids

One feels that thinking on a film by the Coen brothers, especially a comedy, is a fruitless exercise. Those guys design their work in such a way that it’s not merely immune to navel-gazing, it actually mocks the navel-gazers. And bless their hearts for it. As David Bazan has sung: You’re so creative With your…

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Documentary

Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul – Uniting Modernity and Tradition in Turkish Music

MUHAMMED NOUSHAD reviews Fatih Akin’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul.  Turkish music is irresistibly intoxicating. The more you listen to it, the more it binds you inside. Once you begin to indulge in its soothing pleasure, it engages you to endless entrapment. Here, modernity cohabits with tradition as in the historic city…

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Crime

Movie Review: Purple Noon

This is the first post in The Cinematic Mr. Ripley, a series for the MovieThoughts category of my blog that considers moral themes in Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels and the film adaptations of those books. This post looks at Purple Noon, the 1960 French adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Alain Delon. It…

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Disney

Movie Review – The Mountain Between Us

EXPECTATIONS: Simple yet romantic survival story. REVIEW: WARNING: This review may contain heavy traces of cheese. Before I start off this review, let me just make this one thing clear. I do like romantic films. This year alone, we have great films like Their Finest, The Big Sick, Our God’s Country and Call Me By…

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Crime

Le Cercle Rouge

Gliding almost without speech down the dawn streets of a wet Paris winter, these men in trench coats and fedoras perform a ballet of crime, hoping to win and fearing to die. Some are cops and some are robbers. To smoke for them is as natural as breathing. They use guns, lies, clout, greed and nerve with the skill of a magician who no longer even thinks about the cards. They share a code of honor which is not about what side of the law they are on, but about how a man must behave to win the respect of those few others who understand the code.

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Comedy

REVIEW: “Coup de Chance” (2024) |

Woody Allen’s 50th film, “Coup de Chance” made a pretty good impression after premiering at last year’s Venice International Film Festival and then in France a short time later. Since then it has been finding its way to screens including here in the States courtesy of MPI Media Group. It’s Allen’s first French-language feature. And…

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Drama

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE

I feel like I should start out this review by saying I was a big fan of the 2 previous A Quiet Place movies. You can read my reviews here and here. They did a great job establishing atmosphere and creating compelling characters I could breathe with for the moment. However, they are not movies…

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Adventure

REVIEW: “Something in the Water” (2024) |

The bluntly titled “Something in the Water” hearkens back to those good old days of perusing the horror section of my local mom-and-pop video store, carefully examining the VHS boxes of movies I’d never heard of, in search of some fun late-night entertainment. For better or worse, “Something in the Water” plays a lot like…

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Horror

Blowing Job: Our Review of The Last Exorcism

The Last Exorcism (2010) IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, THE SON AND THE HOLY SPIRIT! I COMPEL YOU BACK TO THE BOTTOMLESS PIT OF HELL WHE – Oh hello, didn’t see you there! You’ve caught me right in the middle of exorcising my fellow reviewer Ryan Fleming. He suggested this week we watch something…

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Animation

Movie Review – Inside Out 2

“Can you please just give us the Cliff Notes version, should we take our kids to see it and will we enjoy it too?” – sure, you will all have a good time, grab some popcorn safe in the knowledge that Pixar rarely fail, but that is why, whilst I liked Inside Out 2…it was…

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Movie Reviews

Deadpool & Wolverine Review

Deadpool & Wolverine Review | An R-Rated Laugh Riot That’s Thin on Plot but Thick on Entertainment Out of the Marvel movies, Deadpool isn’t the one where the audience anticipates a solid plot in order to be entertained. It is the fun we get because of

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