The Rental is a film that offers many generic elements. It combines aspects of horror and thriller, and within those we find features of the surveillance and home invasion sub-genres, and also the well-worn slasher. The characters are combinations of private, professional and political concepts, and the clashes between these form much of the drama…
Fueled by over-prescription of highly addictive painkillers, two thirds of all drug overdose deaths reported in 2016 involved opioids. Though the film industry has been late in dramatizing the epidemic, several high profile films have been released this year on the subject including Peter Hedges’ powerful and moving Ben is Back, starring the director’s son,…
Suburbicon, the worst and even worse timed movie of the year, feels like someone put “Pleasantville,” “Fargo,” and the Vault Tech initiation videos from the Fall Out video game franchise into a blender in a grotesque, heavy on the white-splaning approximation of the recipe for “Do the Right Thing.” The resulting slop, entirely missing ingredients…
Matthew McConaughey (“Interstellar”) stars in Gold, a dreary rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags tale directed by Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”) that, while the Academy Award-winning actor (for “Dallas Buyers Club”) gives a passionate, above average performance (along with a perky Bryce Dallas Howard, “Pete’s Dragon”) in, the narrative of a 1980s mining company striking it rich is often muddled and…
For someone as visible in the world as President Barack Obama, one could say, “There ain’t nothin’ about that dude, that we don’t already know.” But is that true? Is there something we haven’t seen or heard before about him? The new drama Barry (which is a nickname President Obama went by for folks who…
“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…
Based on the best-selling novel “Alan Turing: The Enigma” by Andrew Hodges comes The Imitation Game, a character study of Alan Turing, the English mathematician credited with deciphering the Enigma code used by Nazi Germany during WW II. There’s also a fair bit more to it, like the in-house drama within the Government Code and…
