While Cruella de Vil is an iconic Disney villain, is there much potential in showing the origin story of a character whose fashion sense leads to her wanting to skin 101 Dalmatians? The answer is a yes as prominent as the eponymous character’s bi-colored hair, as director Craig Gillespie and screenwriters Dana Fox and Tony…
1917 is director Sam Mendes’ first film since 2015’s 007 picture, “Spectre,” and no doubt reaches the pantheon of respected war films. A Best Picture contender at this year’s Academy Awards, the film is a visual masterpiece, aided by the lens of 15-time Oscar nominee Roger Deakins, strong direction and an uncompromising look at No…
An older major league baseball player becoming a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II to foil an atomic bomb plot has enough palpable atmosphere to be a compelling and pulpy noir. What is even more intriguing, is that it actually occurred. Based off the 1994 biography written by Nicholas…
Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. So. “Kingsman: The Secret Service” was admittedly a surprise hit for most people. I, like many, found that it was an inventive, satirical yet loving take on the spy genre in just the right climate. Much like “Kick-Ass” before, Matthew Vaughn took an imaginative, but ultimately flaccid, concept of Mark Millar’s…
I wasn’t there of course when the concept for this movie, The Brothers Grimsby, was bandied about by writers (including Sacha Baron Cohen), but I can only imagine it went kind of like this: “Hey, I’ve got an idea about two brothers who were separated by adoption as children. One goes on to become a…
When a pug is named after Jack Bauer, Colin Firth shoots stun rays through an umbrella and Samuel L. Jackson talks with an ear-piercing lisp while trying to wipe out the human race with disruptive waves sent from cellphones . . . well, it’s rather obvious you are dealing with a different kind of movie….
“Sometimes, it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one imagines” Mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing experiences both triumph and tragedy in Norwegian director Morton Tydlum’s The Imitation Game, the true story of a man whose help in breaking the Nazi’s Enigma Code during World War II may…
