It doesn’t take much to convince cinephiles like me to visit the film theater. In fact, it’s more the opposite: it takes very strong reasons to keep me away. My personal methodology of trying to watch movies without any prior knowledge remains extremely strict, so for Boy Kills World, the presence of Bill Skarsgård (It) was more than enough to spark interest in a basic …
There are times when we get to watch a film that makes us realize what our future might look like and paints a very dark picture in front of us. In Alex Garland’s Civil War, viewers find themselves in the middle of a gruesome fight between the people and the state. Throughout …
Alex Garland has a penchant for mutually assured destruction. His writing and, in recent years, his directing revolve around this theme; the Danny Boyle sci-fi masterpiece and Garland written Sunshine (2006) consists of characters debating the moral repercussions of saving another spaceship at risk of losing humanity; Garland’s Annihilation (2018) climaxes with a symbiotic reflection of …
Kristi Shimek is Arcadian’s editor and one of the people responsible for helping to create the post-apocalyptic tension in director Ben Brewer’s horror thriller. Arcadian is a story of survival, where ferocious creatures that go bump in the night are after a father and his twin boys. The film stars Nicholas Cage as the dad, Paul, with Jaeden Martell and Maxwell …
Who doesn’t love a good revenge movie? Throughout the years, we’ve seen John Wick take out people for killing his dog, Robert McCall takes out people for an old friend, and Cassandra Thomas hunts down the men who sexually assaulted her best friend. The latest comes in the form of …
Dev Patel exploded into global consciousness in Slumdog Millionaire, the 2008 British smash hit that opened the Western world’s eyes to the cinematic possibilities within India. Since then, Mr. Patel’s roles have largely been in Western films with an Indian setting – the two Marigold Hotel movies, the biopic Lion, and a few thrillers. But even in …
In Aesop’s Fables, a set of tales told to children to imbue them with socially correct morals, exists the story of “The North Wind and The Sun.” The iconic fable describes how the anthropomorphic entities of the Wind and the Sun argued between themselves on the best method in getting someone …
Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Drive-Away Dolls – directed by Coen, written by the pair, and edited by Cooke – has been a long time in the making but arrives at a strange juncture in the Coen extended family’s careers. When Joel and Ethan Coen announced a temporary split and solo projects after decades of operating as the Coen Brothers, all eyes …
Certain movies make a splashy entrance into prestigious film festivals, and while making a grand entrance, those films take time to appear in cinemas. In some cases, that can be a good thing. Recent examples include Martin Scorsese’s Killers of The Flower Moon, which earned ten Academy Award nominations. Whereas other films from …
Liam Neeson might have one of Hollywood’s most exciting career trajectories. From his Oscar-winning work in the 1990s (Schindler’s List), his career pivoted in 2008. Neeson’s hit action film Taken turned him into a different kind of actor. Flash forward twenty-two years, and he has morphed into an action star. That delivered universally enjoyable cinema …
Road House, from director Doug Liman and starring Jake Gyllenhaal is now streaming. Should we compare remakes to the original? This central question guides most film critics when they compare a modernized version of a popular film made decades ago. Some say we shouldn’t hold the original as the only …
With a compelling story centered around self-discovery, season 1 of The Tourist is the next thing you should put on your watchlist. The Tourist is an Australian thriller series centered around a man (played by Jamie Dornan) who wakes up in the hospital with amnesia. It made the licensing rounds, first premiering on the BBC, …
In Sleeping Dogs, co-written and directed by Adam Cooper, truth is a point of view through the memory of ex-homicide detective Roy Freeman. Academy Award winner Russell Crowe (recently in Land of Bad) stars as Freeman, a man in crisis with a memory that is quite broken. Freeman is a recluse, and his home is …
Same town, new story: we heard those words in the 1989 movie Road House. Fast forward 25 years, and we have a new town, same story with the new Amazon Studios movie Road House. Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) walks into an underground fight, ready to take on Carter (Post Malone), but the moment …
Michael Keaton has been considered one of the generation’s best (and most popular) actors. Besides his oozing on-screen charisma, he is arguably one of the most likable people in Hollywood. This includes his starring roles in iconic films including but not limited to Batman, Batman Returns, and Beetlejuice. Those films made him a household name that …
The G, from writer-director Karl R. Hearne, is an unusual crime thriller in that its central character is a woman in her sixties and the insults of aging are central to the crimes at its core. But the unusual intelligence of The G is that it knows that physical weakness means little if …
Punctuation can speak volumes. The latest feature from writer-director duo Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman – Coup! – joins the ranks of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! in adding an exclamation point to a punch title, immediately suggesting a zany, irreverent take on social paranoia during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. As the world recovers from war …
Amelia’s Children is the latest movie from writer and director Gabriel Abrantes. Starring Carloto Cotta (as twins!), Brigette Lundy-Paine, Anabela Moreira, and Alba Baptista, this is a horror movie about mothers and sons and well, a whole lot of creepy. Edward, our main character, is adopted. His search for his origins takes him to Portugal where …
James Nunn’s One Shot had the biggest potential out of any direct-to-video actioner Scott Adkins led in so long: an action film staged like a one-take in which Adkins would topple as many baddies as possible as if the audience were playing a video game. And while it certainly contained its moments of pure spectacle, …
The year is 2041, and death before one’s time does not necessarily mean the end of one’s life in Robert Hloz’s sleek sci-fi thriller. Restore Point takes its title from this new technology, managed in a central database in a nondescript metropolis of tarnished chrome (perhaps Prague in the future, though signs of its …