The Virtuoso, an edgy, slow-burn thriller directed by Nick Stagliano, hosts an impressive cast of pedigreed actors recognizable from a breadth of film and television appearances. We’re treated to Sir Anthony Hopkins, who, now acting in his 80s, has remarked that he’s having a lot of fun nowadays, choosing from a bin-load of scripts that…
Within the current world of digitally-released cinema, it can be easy to discover what are the treasures versus the trash. And somehow, within the span of only two minutes into Lionsgate’s latest production, Vanquish, I knew what I was looking at was easily the second category — the 2021 equivalent of discovering a mangled DVD…
Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini return with Things Heard & Seen, a film with so many things going on, you can’t classify it as belonging to one particular genre/subgenre. It’s a psychological horror film, a ghost story, a couple drama, and a spirit flick that becomes imbued with religious imagery. If anything, you…
A single environment further enclosed by the forces of winter has proved a suspenseful setting for many a film. From “The Shining” to “The Thing” to “The Hateful Eight,” filmmakers have taken advantage of isolation and inhospitable conditions to create scenarios that breed mistrust, paranoia and outright aggression. Some incorporate a wider expanse into their…
Edoardo Ponti (“Coming & Going”) has provided his mother, the great Sophia Loren (“Nine”), with her ninety-eighth film credit and her first starring role in 16 years in The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé), a sincere if somewhat flawed look at the relationship between an orphaned Muslim boy from Senegal and an aging…
Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone are back, six months after the release of their last (and worst) film, “Superintelligence.” Their latest work, Thunder Force, is a superhero comedy telling the story of best friends Lydia (McCarthy, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”) and Emily (Octavia Spencer, “The Shape of Water”), who become the superhero duo known…
In 1845, a crowd gathers in a field as a young girl is hooded and hoisted into the air by a rope tied to an old oak tree. The men surrounding the base of the tree light a fire, and a priest prays aloud, holding a doll in his hands. The crowd does nothing to…
