A B-actioner with grade-A action seems like a cinematic contradiction, but what better way to describe “John Wick” and its sparkling new sequel? The cheesy one-liners, stock villains, thin plot, and characters built entirely on an actor’s presence all put John Wick: Chapter 2 in B-ish territory (an easier place for shoot-em-up pics to find…
It Lives in the Attic? “It Lives in the Back of the Amazon Watchlist,” more like. Here is the latest from questionable auteur Steve Hudgins, the founder of Big Biting Pig Productions, a company specializing in ultra-low budget films made by him and his partner in crime, P.J. Woodside. The plot of It Lives in…
One night, on a quiet neighborhood street, a black man walks along, minding his business, trying to remember directions he was given. He mumbles to himself about street names and how “confusing and scary-ass” the suburbs are (true story). A white Porsche creeps up behind him, eventually pulling ahead of him to idle near the…
Directed by Nick McAnulty and Brian Allan Stewart, this found footage shocker, Capture Kill Release, seems like a natural progression in the tradition of films such as “The Honeymoon Killers” and “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” Combining strong performances, a wicked script, and an appropriately dreadful atmosphere, it’s a worthwhile entry into a sub-genre…
Emad Etesami (Shahab Hosseini, “About Elly”) and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti, “The Wedlock”), a childless married couple in their early thirties, are amateur actors playing the lead roles in a local production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” a play in which a good man’s virtue turns to hypocrisy and his marriage crumbles….
Paul Verhoeven is back with more scratchy sexual politics, darkly comic innuendos, and harshly nasty violence. First things first, the most joyous part of that sentence is the beginning. Paul Verhoeven is back. Not back to Hollywood, of course, which he left nearly 17 years ago after the dismal response to his schlocky invisibility thriller…
The on-the-road murder mystery, Road to the Well, is quite an imaginative and intriguing vehicle from the creative mind of writer-producer-director Jon Cvack. Although this titillating indie does not have the bombastic aura of the cookie-cutter goosebump whodunits so prevalent in mainstream Hollywood thrillers today, the intimate and small-scale production still resonates effectively with the…
