As the ragged and haggard anti-hero in Jean-François Richet’s rollicking grind-house showcase Blood Father, lead character John Link is a lost wrecking ball in search of raging redemption despite whatever erratic and intrinsic demons that beleaguered his unstable psyche. Well, this description can also be applied to the relentlessly problematic performer playing this graying, leather-skinned…
When I first saw the trailer for The Infiltrator, I had high hopes, considering it concerns a U.S. Customs agent (Robert Mazur, for the record), responsible for nearly bankrupting the Medellín Cartel, which was an organized network of drug suppliers and smugglers originating in the city of Medellín, Colombia. If you were into cocaine in…
Vapidity loves company. Nicolas Winding Refn is all about the surface-level pose and the finely tuned image, so it’s fitting that his latest movie, The Neon Demon, sets its sights on the modelling industry and its harshly high standards of beauty. The plan is to use horror elements to illuminate the dark corners of a…
Keanu is an effortlessly enjoyable comedy film, bleeding with the comedic chemistry of its stars. Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael-Key can add another success to their belt in an untouched category that is hopefully just beginning.
British social realism is a cinema movement that developed in the 1960s with an eye to portraying the dour and grim reality of working class life in Britain. Such titles as “Kes” (1969), “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1960) and “My Beautiful Launderette” (1985) explored social tensions around race, gender and sexuality, as well as…
Times are tough. These times I mean. Or rather, Tim Blake Nelson does, or seems to do in his Anesthesia. These are times of self-absorbing, self-imbibing, self-obsessed selfishness from which we’re constantly trying to tell ourselves apart — unwittingly remitting ourselves to the badlands of choice wherein our decisions continue to be ruled by self-interest…
Jacques Audiard has previously explored his primary cinematic interests by telling a tale of crime as a way of life and a tale of an unlikely family as a means of redemption. Now he’s combined the two in his latest movie, where he examines the intersection of these dramatically rich topics with carefully complex attention….
