A CLASSIC (YET IMPERFECT) “ONE MAN ARMY” FLICK Within the action film genre, there lies a storied tradition of narrative storytelling that derives from the classic (yet always beloved) “one man army” yarn. There have been many of these films across the many decades of action cinematic history, yet they all roughly remain the […]
Continue reading “The Beekeeper (2024)”
The Bikeriders is a 2024 film based on a book of the same name. The book is a collection of photography and interviews from the 1960’s into the 1970’s following the rise and fall of their bike club. From humble and simple beginnings to the seedier underbelly that creeps in as the story progresses, the […]
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I heard the buzz about Woman Of The Hour when it was playing festivals a while back. Now, it has arrived here in the UK on Netflix so I gave Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut a watch. To be honest I did not get the film I was expecting from pre-release hype, I feel that the […]
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Mainland Chinese actor Shen Teng/沈騰 is a hot commodity these days. His third film this year, SUCCESSOR/抓娃娃, is currently tearing up the domestic box office, taking in over US$456 million so far and becoming the country’s highest-grossing comedy in summer box office history. Shen is back again with UNTOUCHABLE and this one is a complete […]
Continue reading “Untouchable 逆鳞”
Longlegs is a film so obsessed with subtext that it often loses sight of delivering satisfying text. It is understandable why it might have lost some audiences – and critics – on that basis. But the best horror is often found when reading between the lines. The darkest, most impactful moments found in Osgood Perkins’ […]
Continue reading “Longlegs and The Politics of Hopelessness”
Muhteşem kadro seçimiyle ‘burn after reading’ filmi; alkolik olduğu öne sürülerek CIA’deki işinden kovulan emekli ajan Ozzie Cox’ın, intikam almak için gizli bilgileri bir cd’ye kaydetmesiyle başlıyor. Cox ile boşanmak isteyen eşi Katie ise cd’yi gizlice alır ve gittiği spor salonunda unutur. Spor salonunun (ve benim gözümde filmin süper ikilisi) iki çalışanı Chad ve Linda […]
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John Boorman directs Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson and John Vernon in this classic thriller where a left-for-dead career criminal stalks the partner, the wife and the organisation who have his $93,000. Richard Stark’s The Hunter is one of my favourite novels. A focussed, resourceful and amoral individual taking down a syndicate that is too big […]
Continue reading “Point Blank (1967)”
An airport security guard finds her life upended by a sketchy/flirty pixie in green hair and fingernails in “Green Night,” a Chinese romantic thriller starring Fan Bingbing that gives international exposure to Ms. Trouble in Green, Korean starlet Lee Joo-young. Our heroine is one of those nameless global functionaries with a metal detector wand who […]
Continue reading “Green Night”
Most of the horror community loves a good serial killer story. As morbid as it is, there are hundreds of thousands of hours of true crime podcasts, TV series, and films that either recount the true events of innocent people being dispatched by a depraved mind or take inspiration from these murders to create fictional […]
Continue reading “Longlegs”
Joker: Folie Á Deux will leave folks split on their opinions and we all know that doing sequels can be a bit dicey trying to recapture the magic. Lightning in a bottle didn’t go down this time, but if you like musicals, witnessing a Phoenix and Gaga duet is totally worth it.
“Wolfs”, which was released on Apple TV+ in a few days ago, works best whenever it simply focuses on whatever is exchanged between its two charismatic star actors. Having actually worked together more once in several notable films, they constantly click well with each other with considerable chemistry, and that is why it is rather […]
Wolfs (2024) ☆☆1/2(2.5/4): Two fixers stuck with each other
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…
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…
What’s an out of work clown to do? Louison (played by Dominique Pinon) didn’t lose his job due to a lack of charm, he has that in abundance. Unfortunately his life took an unexpected turn with the death of his performing partner. The truth to be told, his partner didn’t simply die, he was…
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…
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.
What we get here is a solid action series that hits all the beats it needs to do, not revolutionary, but still solid. Disclosure – I paid for the Amazon Prime subscription that viewed this series. Reacher Review – When I first heard there would be a new Reacher series, my first impressions […]
A swing and a miss this boring noir drama is brimming with quality visuals and A list talent. Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara, and Cate Blanchett put the story through its paces and make it watchable to a point, but it is a hard watch.
I’m glad that Sandra Bullock said yes to The Unforgivable, a well-executed tale of one woman’s journey to reconnect with her sister after finishing a twenty-year prison sentence. Directed by Nora Fingscheidt, what stood out immediately, in addition to the excellent performances, is how engaging the story is. I cared about Bullock’s character and couldn’t wait for […]
THE UNFORGIVABLE (2021): The Things I Liked…
Hollywood loves a remake. Sometimes it’s a successful foreign film recast with English-speaking celebrities. Sometimes it’s a decent story that just didn’t work the first time around. Most of the time, it’s a hollow-minded cash-grab by a studio rejiggering its intellectual property. But now and then, it’s a filmmaker of regard taking a bonafide classic […]
