The crew of three dock with their starship to Mars, pop the hatch on their shiny, white, aluminum alloy and glass space ship and busy themselves with firing it up to make another trip to the Red Planet, and overcoming motion sickness. It’s a complex “cycler” craft, generating artificial gravity by tethering and rotating the […]
Netflixable? A “Stowaway” on a space ship? Who isn’t an Alien? Or a Predator?
The Second Civil War (1997) A very uncivil comedy So, Joe Dante’s unjustly obscure 1997 HBO movie, The Second Civil War, landed on Binge recently as part of the Aussie streaming service’s ongoing process of trawling through HBO’s more obscure properties for content. Having not watched the thing in years since I lost or gave […]
Looking back, I think that two movies shaped and/or reinforced my views on “the criminal mind,” the folks who rob, cheat, vandalize and threaten as if they were born to it. “Donnie Brasco” (1998) set in stone my hunch that what Deep Throat said about the Watergate Burglars and the GOP leadership holds true for […]
Classic Film Review: Hoffman’s at his toughest doing “Straight Time” (1978)
Some films achieve “classic” status and even become pop culture shorthand, but eventually find themselves dismissed as overly-earnest, “of its time,” or even “self-parody.” More than one Stanley Kramer production of the ’50s on into the ’70s has suffered that fate. A self-conscious/socially-conscious filmmaker, it’s hard to think of anybody in the modern cinema that […]
Classic Film Review: “The Defiant Ones” (1958) hold up a lot better than expected
This could be the greatest high brow movie battle of all time, pitting Roger Ebert’s favorite movie against the most decorated movie of the 80s. Amadeus was released in 1984 to critical praise and is the fictional biography of Mozart, the famous composer, and his story shares a lot in common with Ebert’s favorite movie, […]
Greatest of the High Brow: Beethoven vs Mozart
In 1946, a London writer, Juliet (Lily James) exchanges letters with a Guernsey farmer, Dawsey (Michiel Huisman) and she begins to learn about what the islanders endured during World War II under German occupation. I read the book on which this film is based a while ago. I’m also (as of August 2020) a resident […]
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)
Title – The Wages of Fear (1953) Director – Henri-Georges Clouzot (Manon) Cast – Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli, Peter van Eyck Plot – When an oil well ignites in flames deep in a remote section of South American wilderness, a group of four men are enticed via significant financial incentives to transport a […]
Classic Review – The Wages of Fear (1953)
Christoph Waltz stars in and makes his directorial debut with “Georgetown”, a too-crazy-to-be-true crime drama that’s actually based on an true story. Well, sort of. The film is written by screenwriter David Auburn and is taken from a 2012 New York Times Magazine article by Franklin Foer titled “The Worst Marriage in Georgetown”. I haven’t […]
“There’s something sinister in the woods.” It’s not a direct line of dialogue from NEON’s upcoming eco-horror film “Gaia” but it could have been. This eerie new chiller from director Jaco Bouwer utilizes the tried-and-true creepy forest setting to great effect, sucking us into another bizarre and unsettling deep-woods scenario that melds mystery with the […]
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 7 out of 10. Well, this show has been all the rave recently, and in my typical fashion, I went into this one hoping that I’d be able to go against the tide and rip Mare of Easttown to pieces. Unfortunately, I won’t be doing that, but it’s not exactly a laudation either… […]
Moreish Mare of Easttown Proves You Can Have Too Much Of A Good Thing
Prisoners – MOVIE REVIEWKeller’s daughter goes missing and when he soon realises that the police are taking longer than he thought, he decides to take things into his own hands by going out to find his daughter’s kidnapper himself. However, his mental health begins to decline and so he starts doing things he will soon regret leading him […]
This recently restored film is an interesting look at George Romero and a controversial subject. The Amusement Park (1973) was a discarded film, originally created by Romero as a commission work for the Lutheran Service Society in Pittsburg, but not widely used and thought lost. The original 16mm reels were sitting in Romero’s basement aka […]
One Day YOU will be old – The Amusement Park review #georgeromero
Where were you in 2006? Back in the days of flip-phones and Netscape, you probably couldn’t have it much worse than Michael (Ozark’s Charlie Tahan). He’s working as a campus bus driver, ferrying boozed and drugged up students around a freezing Rochester New York, with the attendant vomit-stains and fractured feelings about life that predictably […]
A Quiet Place was perhaps the pinnacle of the sensory deprivation horror of the late 2010s – the last of a plethora of films that tried to reinvest the multiplex with a new sensory immediacy by focusing on characters who had one or many senses disabled. That movement didn’t necessarily feel exhausted by A Quiet […]
Krasinski: A Quiet Place Part II (2021)
Needless to say my expectations for the new Christian Petzold film were through the roof. The German filmmaker’s last two movies, 2014’s “Phoenix” and 2018’s “Transit”, are both snugly among my favorites from the last decade. His latest “Undine” has finally come to the States courtesy of IFC Films. And while it might not pack […]
Title – Dreamland (2019) Director – Miles Joris-Peyrafitte (As You Are) Cast – Margot Robbie, Finn Cole, Garrett Hedlund, Travis Fimmel Plot – During the heat of the Great Depression, lonely Texan teenager Eugene Evans (Cole) strikes up a friendship with on the run bank robber Allison Wells (Robbie) as the two hatch a plan […]
Film Review – Dreamland (2019)
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 8.5 out of 10. I know I’ve been on a bit of a ’70s run recently, with the likes of The Long Goodbye, The French Connection, The Parallax View and Marathon Man, so I thought this would be a nice change of gear with recent Netflix series Mindhunter. But, ah ha! I’ve fooled […]
How Mindhunter Makes Conversation More Frightening Than Blood
Ok, who hasn’t dreamed dark thoughts about some social media troll who’s made disgusting, cruel or hateful comments about something you’ve said, shared or posted? No one, right? There’s something very satisfying about the thought that some thinks-he-or-she-is-anonymous online troll realizing, with shock, that they aren’t protected from their ugly, sometimes violent opinions by “anonymity” […]
Movie Review: “The Columnist” has a REAL problem with hate mail
(Anne Marie Foy/Netflix) Where will Sandy’s life end up in the third season of The Kominsky Method TV show on Netflix? As we all know, the Nielsen ratings typically play a big role in determining whether a TV show like The Kominsky Method is cancelled or renewed for season four (in this case, we know season […]
The Kominsky Method: Season Three Viewer Votes
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 8.5 out of 10. This happens to be a great film, yet also an action film, yet also with a deep, dark message. How? In the modern age, it’s sad that all of those are basically exclusive from one another. But, back in the early seventies, The French Connection was just about ready […]
The Awesome Bleakness Of The French Connection