J.C. Chandor’s (“All Is Lost”) Amazonian heist thriller, Triple Frontier, has a stellar cast and equally impressive cinematography — as some of Hollywood’s most recognizable stars traverse South American rainforests and mountainous peaks to lift hundreds of millions of dollars off a local drug lord. While some of the narrative feels somewhat tired — as…
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” — John Keats While it is generally agreed that imagination plays a prominent role in artistic creation, it is apparent to all but some academics and literary biographers with a particular agenda, that art cannot exist…
For a film with a tantalizing title like Velvet Buzzsaw, it sure is disappointing. What a shame. The talented cast, with the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal (“Stronger”), Rene Russo (“Thor:The Dark World”), Toni Collette (“Hereditary”) and a criminally underutilized John Malkovich (“Warm Bodies”), try their best to salvage the poorly thought-out narrative. However, it is…
In Stray, an orphaned young woman struggles to discover the reasons behind her mother’s death, aided by an indefatigable detective with child-care issues of her own. The plot is also tinged with a bit of the supernatural, which typically would raise this movie a few cuts above your standard police procedural. Instead, the film left…
In 1978, director John Carpenter made one of the most profitable and influential indie horror films in the history of American cinema, “Halloween.” Some critics argue that it jump-started the slasher genre, although “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) and “Ecologia del delitto” (1971) precede it, as well as plenty of Italian giallo flicks and earlier…
Is it possible to do questionable things for a noble cause? Well, veteran director Catherine Hardwicke (“Twilight”) and first-time full feature screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer clumsily answer that thematic question with Miss Bala, an Americanized reshaping of a 2011 Spanish-language tale with the same name. Their vision replays similar story beats as the original, but lacks…
Piercing has the singular, most chilling opening sequence I have ever seen in a movie. I don’t think it can get any more horrifying than an ice pick brandished in a newborn baby’s face. This immediately set me on edge, and this tension continued all through the exposition. It seems that Reed (an eerily unsettling…
