It isn’t likely one will recognize any members of the cast of Cement Suitcase, a film written and directed by J. Rick Castaneda (whose resume includes just a few short features, including “Math and Other Problems”). Yes, a person may have a fleeting bit of acknowledgement, but will most likely say, “Oh, he/she just looks…
The gruff male character is sitting in his car on his own, drinking alcohol, looking at a picture of his young daughter, because this shows that he’s haunted by personal tragedies. If that wasn’t enough, he suspiciously regards the people around him as he walks through the airport. Just in case this makes him too…
Paul W.S. Anderson might just be the very avatar of filmmaking mediocrity. Starting with the legendarily bad “Mortal Kombat” adaptation and working his way up a bit from there, he’s made a living off churning out genre films not awful enough to be memorable, but just bad in enough noticeable, glaring ways to make for…
The plot of Nurse 3D is clearly spelled out in the beginning of the movie when a sluttily dressed woman named Abigail Russell seduces a married man at a bar, slices open his femoral artery and pushes him over a roof ledge while saucily confessing to the audience she does things like this to cleanse…
There’s not much more frustrating than a film that comes so close to being thought-provoking and perceptive, but chooses instead to focus on apathetic plights and easy solutions. The Monuments Men embodies this all too well, dangling fascinating questions just out of reach, all the while cycling through a series of genre tropes from rousing…
Part good. Part bad. All modern. RoboCop, everyone’s favorite cinematic cyborg do-gooder, returns to the big screen after a 21-year absence, now in a shiny, sanitized package that smartly brings the character into our post-9/11 reality only to malfunction halfway through by blandly defanging the franchise’s satirical bite. The opening chunk of José Padilha’s 2014…
Cuban Fury is, among other things, the result of a drunken email in which Nick Frost asked his producer if she thought a movie in which he dances would be a good idea. Evidently she did, and so the film came about. It prescribes very much to Nick Frost’s style of humor, but many are…
