Pulitzer Prize-winner David Mamet is no stranger to filmmaking. Besides his iconic writing efforts like Glengarry Glen Ross and Wag the Dog, Mamet is also no stranger to directing. With a focus primarily on short films and TV movies, he has directed relatively few theatrical features. Granted, not all of …
When Squid Game, the South Korean survival drama series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk, debuted in 2021, it took the world by storm, topping Netflix’s most-watched list barely two weeks in, and at one point becoming “the most in-demand show in the world, with 79 times as much audience interest as …
The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt’s quietly hypnotic film about a worryingly inept thief, is almost about everything else except the heist our anti-hero spends the first half-hour planning. The loose structure unravels just as quickly as the plan itself, and the longer we spend adrift with James (Josh O’Connor), it becomes …
German master crafter of epic-scope action films, Wolfgang Petersen, famous for his Academy-Award nominated 1982 World War II Das Boot, later in his life became a name in Hollywood for when you needed an author to sculpt a large-scale action film. Petersen ranges from the classic heartbreaking family movie The …
Australian director Charles Williams presents his debut feature: Inside. Williams won the short film Palme d’Or in 2018 at Cannes for All These Creatures and soon became a potential talent for the future. Six years later, the director narrates the story of a young man, Mel (Vincent Miller), who is …
British gangster content has become a popular pastime for entertainment media enthusiasts. There’s a heightened quality that’s proven uproariously entertaining for viewers. British gangster classics such as Snatch, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Layer Cake, and the old-school The Long Good Friday proved this correct. One commonality amongst some …
Director Gareth Evans made waves with his 2011 film, The Raid: Redemption, and its 2014 sequel, The Raid 2. Both films became modern-day staples of the action genre, delivering a one-of-a-kind experience. They are films that, 10+ years later, still have an impact on the cultural discussion of action movies. …
The gift Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi has given to us all is no accident. Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident uses a very simple scenario to ask unanswerable questions about what makes a person good. It does this by offering four people a chance many dream of: the …
Everybody knows the greatest thing about Wes Anderson’s movies is their sense of style. Style is the tool he uses to bring lightness to dark and complex subjects such as grief, the creeping threat of fascism and being an insufferable young person. The staging and blocking, the centering of images, …
The ripped-from-the-headlines Case 137 (Dossier 137) combines two genres everybody loves. The first is the detailed bureaucracy of justice and how much easier it is to find objective truth since we all started carrying recording devices (our mobile phones) around at all times. Think Anatomy of a Fall and Saint …
Paul Feig gave us an entertaining, sexy mystery with the 2018 movie A Simple Favor. He’s back, along with Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, with the sequel Another Simple Favor, currently streaming on Prime Video, but where the first was a clever look at motherhood and being a girl’s girl, Another …
Bullet Train Explosion marks Japan’s return to one of cinema’s most intense rail thrillers, nearly fifty years after the release of Junya Sato’s classic The Bullet Train. This legacy sequel is directed by Shinji Higuchi (Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman) and penned by Kazuhiro Nakagawa and Norichika Ōba. While the concept …
Gareth Evans isn’t a filmmaker with an extensive portfolio, but cult classics The Raid and The Raid 2 were enough to cement his legacy in action cinema. Any avid fan of the genre recognizes these movies as a major influence – not just for the intensity of their fight set …
Silver Star, a determinedly quirky little movie, is a throwback to the indie cinema of the nineties in the best way. It stands and falls entirely on the actions of two unpredictable people, thrown together through a combination of foolishness and bad decisions, and who stick together through a combination …
And now, man without fear, he must face the final curtain: except of course it isn’t. Like James Bond (RIP), Reacher will return. The zeitgeist can be guessed at and striven for, but it cannot be faked and it cannot be bought, because the audience never knows what truly speaks …
I’ve mentioned this countless times throughout my years of film criticism: not every movie needs to be narratively and thematically profound, impacting audiences so deeply with philosophical messages that their lives are forever changed. Cinema is, among many things, entertainment. So, it’s no surprise when films like Freaky Tales emerge, …
It’s a new dawn on Reacher. This is the first episode of the entire show in which Reacher (the splendid Alan Ritchson) goes west of the Mississippi! While Neagley (Maria Sten) lives in Chicago, Reacher’s previous adventures have kept him in Georgia, Arkansas, New York City, Maine, and now Massachusetts. …
Well. If we thought the previous episode of Reacher was plot heavy, in Smoke on the Water all those plot points have babies, meaning there’s an entire family tree of stuff going on that, thanks to the spoiler restrictions from Amazon, reviewers cannot reveal. It’s understandable since so much modern-day …
The news that Amazon are now the owners of the James Bond franchise has landed with some surprise amidst this new season of Reacher. It’s not so much the sale but the fact that the Broccoli family, who creatively controlled the series for over fifty years, relinquished those creative rights …
I will bet a hundred billion dollars the character of Dominique Kohl (Mariah Robinson) was named after the heroine of The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s smash-hit novel from 1943 that introduced the political philosophy of objectivism to the world. Objectivism has been an incredibly influential ethos in economics and politics in …