Jason Bateman seems a pretty likable guy, despite his penchant for sharp, sarcastic characters. Gone are the days of the sweet, nurturing, unassuming hero; we as a society are deeply entrenched in the era of the sarcastic everyman — the guy who doesn’t simply turn the other cheek. This is the guy who reminds you…
Every Secret Thing begins with a birthday party — a pool party. 11-year-old Alice is thrilled to have been invited, but she’s really annoyed that her mother makes her bring Ronnie along. Ronnie is weird, quiet, and awkward, and she’s stalling Alice’s plans to be a popular girl. Also, Alice really doesn’t like that her…
We’re fascinated by superheroes. Our fascination mainly stems from the fact that no matter how much we get to know them, we never get to know them enough; they keep surprising us over and over again. At the brink of every new challenge, of every new puzzle or danger, we still hold the belief that…
A good mystery movie doesn’t necessarily need a great mystery to work, but it certainly helps. So a bad mystery movie with a bland, boring mystery must be pretty damned from the start. That’s where Frank the Bastard finds itself, since despite having a mysterious title and a mysterious premise (a young woman confronts her…
Nightmarish visions abound in Romain Basset’s horror mystery Horsehead and the narrative elements are so tightly focused here that the picture’s success relies almost entirely on the effectiveness of those visions. Basset makes the bold move to let the visions swallow the story so that the movie threatens to topple off the edge of reality…
In the indie thriller, Private Number, writer Michael Lane (Hal Ozsan, “Redline”) is under a lot of pressure. His first novel, Knight Fire, did reasonably well, and now, he’s really struggling to write his second. His loving wife, Katherine (Nicholle Tom, “Hang Loose”), has recently opened her own boutique and really, really wants to have…
Paige Pritchard (Marina Petrano) is your average teenager — she loves her cell phone, her older brother, and hanging out with her friends. She also lies occasionally to her parents, and one night, she tells her parents that she’ll be spending the night at her friend’s house when she actually goes to a party in…
