Comedy

Burn After Reading

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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Crime

Green Night

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 […]

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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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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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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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Crime

THE UNFORGIVABLE (2021): The Things I Liked…

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…

Crime

WEST SIDE STORY

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 […]

WEST SIDE STORY

Crime

The Forever Prisoner (2021): It was torture indeed

HBO documentary “The Forever Prisoner” is often sobering and chilling in its calm but blistering presentation on what the US government allowed to happen in the name of War on Terror. While it did not surprise or shock you much if you are familiar with its main subjects, the documentary is still captivating as providing […]

The Forever Prisoner (2021) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4): It was torture indeed

Comedy

Zola (2020)

Zola (2020) Y’all wanna hear a story? Perhaps this is simply what happens when you turn a Twitter thread into a movie. Zola, the film’s origin lies in a 148-tweet thread posted by Zola the person — A’Ziah ‘Zola’ King — in October 2015, detailing a wild, chaotic road trip from Detroit, Michigan to Tampa, […]

Zola (2020)

Crime

Musical Masterpiece: Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story”

I remember the first time I saw “West Side Story.” I watched the 1961 film during class at my Catholic elementary school decades later — on a square TV on a rolling cart — and it was transformative. I immediately loved the music, choreography, dancing, characters, and storytelling. I watch that version from time to […]

Musical Masterpiece: Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story”