Two siblings and three of their friends en route to visit their grandfather’s grave in Texas end up falling victim to a family of cannibalistic psychopaths and must survive the terrors of Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and his family. This is one of those cornerstones of horror that you’re always aware of even if you’ve never […]
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Not everyone’s going to have an easy life. So this is about a young man (Tom Holland). He goes from college dropout to Army medic, and he serves two years in the Iraq war. He has PTSD when he returns home, which leads to drug addiction. This is an expensive habit to maintain, so he […]
Robbing Banks with PTSD – Cherry (2021)
If Hollywood is going to give screenwriting Oscar nominations to “Borat” movies, brace yourself for pranks, pranks and more pranks pictures. “Bad Trip” is more at the “Bad Grandpa” with Johnny Knoxville end of the practical joke pictures spectrum. A little edge, a few confrontations with angry rural America, waaaay too many bodily function/bodily fluid […]
Netflixable? A “Bad Trip” that goes a prank or two too far
It may be tempting to write “#Alive” off as just another zombie movie. In a way that’s what it is. This South Korean survival thriller from director and co-writer Cho Il-hyung doesn’t bring anything particularly new and it certainly doesn’t reinvent the horror sub-genre. At the same time, it’s hard not to enjoy its nimble […]
“Six Minutes to Midnight” is the sort of high gloss “programmer” Hollywood and Pinewood (and Shepperton, etc.) used to turn out by the dozens. The plot has Nazis, spies, action and preposterous coincidences and improbabilities, a “talks too much” villain, cheap thrills and sentimental sop. But thanks to a game cast and a clever and […]
Movie Review: On the eve of war, it’s “Six Minutes to Midnight”
Sound or the lack of it is an under-appreciated element of cinema, so much so that films that pay extra attention to it stand out. The Oscar-nominated “Sound of Metal” is wholly conceived around loud noise and learning to live in silent deafness. The filmmakers behind “Rose Plays Julie” take care to use muffled sound, […]
Movie Review: “Rose Plays Julie”
“The Courier” is an engrossing espionage thriller set, as so many of them are, at that one point when the Cold War seemed most likely to turn nuclear hot. Well-acted and early ’60s period perfect, about the worst you can say about it is that it’s a washed-out copy of “Bridge of Spies,” which is […]
Movie Review: “The Courier” plays his part in Preventing WWIII
A young woman (Lene Kqiku) awakes drugged and restrained in a strange house, but her captor may be more than he appears. I encountered this short film on Amazon Prime. The premise sounded interesting and with a runtime of only 7.5 I was intrigued. It does a good job of giving the film an undercurrent […]
Hutch Mansell is a mild-mannered everyday average Joe. His days are an endless cycle of monotony – get up, catch the bus, go to work, come back home, go to bed. The only real highlights of his week are his morning cups of coffee and missing the trash truck every Tuesday. Even his family seems […]
Following the enormous success of “Hamilton” what better time for Warner Brothers to release “In the Heights”. This musical drama is an adaptation of a Tony-winning stage play by Quiara Alegría Hudes and “Hamilton” mastermind Lin-Manuel Miranda. Jon M. Chu of “Crazy Rich Asians” fame directs the film from a screenplay written by Hudes with […]
First Glance: “In the Heights”
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. There is no bigger moment than the birth of a child. The newborn brought to life should be cherished and celebrated. It seems nothing could stop life from being happily ever after, except for one event, the worst nightmare of any parent – the kidnapping of the child. It’s […]
⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. We always need someone who can encourage us to do things like write, sing, or study. Anything that can help us improve and get better. Or just uplift our mood so we can focus on the positive side of our life and be happier. Written and directed by Marion […]
SXSW 2021: “Ma Belle, My Beauty”
Gruesome violence and grisly backwoods “surgery,” blood and stitches and axes and arrows, sharp stone shards left as booby-traps for the unwary dominate “In the Earth.” Kind of what you’d expect from a thriller built around mycorrhizal research deep in the forests of Britain, eh? The pandemic picture from the director of “Free Fire,” “High […]
Movie Review: In a Pandemic, Maybe Nature Won’t Share what’s “In the Earth”
Steven Soderbergh’s latest film may not have been shot on an iPhone, but it cut down production fuss in other ways. Over three-quarters of the screenplay was shot on the Queen Mary 2, in a crossing from New York to London, and the cast almost entirely improvised their lines, taking their cues from a rough […]
Soderbergh: Let Them All Talk (2020)
In the States it seems like “Stan & Ollie” came and went with barely a peep. Yes John C. Reilly earned a Golden Globe nomination and the film received a warm reception from critics, but otherwise it’s a film that got no real attention. I don’t remember it hitting any theater around me and the […]
As an action film, Chaos Walking works, it’s a fun popcorn flick, but It’s a pity most of these characters can’t stop talking.
CHAOS WALKING: Talk Less, Do More
Sixteen is already a difficult age, with lots of challenges to navigate, but Sophie Jones has just lost her mother, so the regular rhythms of adolescence are tinged with grief and loss, which somehow makes normal rites of passage seem more trivial, yet each holds the potential power to make her forget, even for a […]
The oddest thing about the new “Tom and Jerry” film is that the titular cat and mouse rivals aren’t even really the stars of their own movie. The live-action/animated hybrid directed by Tim Story places its human characters in the center, the cartoon characters feeling more like comedic ornaments that adorn the scene as needed. […]
Review: “Tom and Jerry” (2021)
Psycho Goreman (2020) Little Girl. Big Psycho. If you imagine a riff on E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) but with the kindly alien botanist swapped out for a bloodthirsty intergalactic warlord who’d look right at home in a GWAR music video, you’re on the right track here. Written and directed by Steven Kostanski, The Void (2016), […]
FIRST COW is one of those films that drops you into another time and every small detail adds to its palpable authenticity. Nobody films slow and beautiful stories like Kelly Reichardt. Cookie (John Magaro) is a man trying to get by in a harsh time, meeting a fellow survivor, a fellow man without place (Orion […]
Review in Brief: First Cow (2019/20)