With a CRACK! that delivers aural and narrative impact, Red Sparrow lays out its cards early on. This CRACK! occurs during a ballet and highlights a key tension of such a performance — any mistake can be disastrous. In this case, the incident involving the CRACK! does prove devastating and foreshadows the ruin to come….
The word allure is defined as the quality of being powerfully and mysteriously attractive or fascinating. In the film Allure, formerly titled “A Worthy Companion,” Laura (Evan Rachel Wood, “The Ides of March”) fascinatingly conveys both power and mystery. We first glimpse her inviting a random man into her home and into her bed. With…
Interestingly Death Wish, the millennial-era remake of the gritty mid 70’s crime thriller of the same name, notoriously arrives in theaters at an increasingly awkward moment in a divisive national climate (particularly in the aftermath of the most recent high school shooting) where the political stakes regarding gun violence in America are at an all-time…
Midway through The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, in the midst of a breakdown (breakthrough?), surrounded by his typewriter and empty bottles and strewn about pages, signifiers of talent devolving into madness, the successful yet troubled novelist at its center self-consciously admits to having recently written only “first lines and first pages. No middle. No end.”…
The Strangers: Prey at Night opens in the late afternoon with two parents preparing the minivan for a trip to take their daughter to boarding school. As Mike (Martin Henderson, “Everest”) loads suitcases into the back, Cindy (Christina Hendricks, “The Neon Demon”) knocks softly on the door frame and tells her daughter, Kinsey (Bailee Madison,…
I enjoyed writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits well enough at first. Yet as my chronological distance from the project increases, so too do my annoyances with its gender power dynamics. The film follows six very specific Brooklynites whose lives are vaguely intertwined and then thrown into further disarray when a young, beautiful Australian disrupts…
Jigsaw starts as a man runs from police to the roof of an abandoned warehouse where he finds a detonator marked by an X behind a beam. In the standoff that follows, he shouts that five people are going to die if Detective Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie, “Fifty Shades Freed”) isn’t brought to the scene…
