In the battle of the 2014 Hercules flicks, Brett Ratner’s sly little smash-em-up, Hercules clearly emerges the victor over Renny Harlin’s unintentionally hilarious blunder, “The Legend of Hercules” from earlier in the year. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s so much as glimpsed a shot from the cheapo origin pic or even…
If there is a mindset that is getting on my nerves more and more as it becomes steadily more prominent, it’s the idea that a work (especially a film) possessing a certain level of either style or ostentatiousness is in and of itself worthy of praise. It’s an ideology that gave the laughably atrocious 2002…
Suicide is no laughing matter. Neither is A Long Way Down, a movie that uses it as a jumping off point to bring together four people whose individual plights are supposed to draw sympathy and whose differences when combined are supposed to create laughable conflict. Of course, it’s not a comedy in the strictest sense,…
The Garrett Hedlund Dilemma: How To Avoid Outlaw Clichés and Maximize Potential. Does the above text currently exist? No, not yet it doesn’t — but the world of cinema may demand it by 2015. The opening scenes of Andrew Levitas’ feature debut, Lullaby, have Mr. Hedlund mirroring the roles of “On The Road” and “Inside…
The horror of Islamic honor killings is the central point of Shan Khan’s impressive directorial debut, Honour, but the film resembles more of a low-budget Jason Bourne flick rather than a cultural investigation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, however. The luminous performance of Aiysha Hart and Khan’s slick style make the film more than…
The plot summary provided for Darkness Descends by writer / actor Frank Krueger seems determined to leave audiences underwhelmed. The summary talks of wars declared and the possibility of New York City itself being torn apart, and yet the film never quite lives up to these expectations. Rather — even if we ignore the ambitions…
“We’re in the business of transformation,” says Colonel Frank Reichert shortly before proving to instead be in the business of humiliation, degradation and manipulation. Reichert is the camp director at Coldwater, a privately run juvenile reform facility (much like many institutions that exist in real life) to which parents send their children in an attempt…
