In the midst of the devastation that was Hurricane Sandy back in 2012, New Jersey’s notorious play land, Atlantic City, was stripped to a bleak and torn terrain. First-time director Emanuele Della Valle uses this as a backdrop for his crime-drama film debut, Wetlands. The grey wasteland welcomes a once rogue Philadelphia cop, Babel (Adewale…
Victorian London has been an effective setting since virtually the beginning of cinema, perhaps unsurprisingly since it was during this period that moving pictures first appeared. From the first adaptation of “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” to Basil Rathbone’s incarnation of “Sherlock Holmes,” from Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lodger” to Johnny Depp’s…
With Detroit, Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) and her team have put together a kick-in-the-mouth, knock-your-socks-off movie experience you won’t forget in a docudrama staging of the Detroit race-riots of 1967. Starting with a routine police raid of an illegal after hours club where the local residents harass the police as they…
The dreadful The Shadow Effect, equal parts 80s action movie and 90s conspiracy thriller, is one of those movies that starts out puzzling and ends up incomprehensible. Overplotted and overacted, the movie is as subtle as a heart attack in a public library. It’s not, however, weighed down by such niceties as nuance and cleverness,…
“. . . You can’t handcuff the wind, If you try you’re gonna fail It’s like trying to put thunder in jail . . .” So sings Richard Thorncroft (Julian Barratt, “ABCs of Death 2”) who experienced a moment of fame in the late eighties, playing Bruce P. Mindhorn, “the best plain-clothes detective the Isle…
Through the years cinema has bent over backwards to portray the good guys with badges as the symbolic warriors of law and order. On some occasions there were dedicated and determined officers that stopped at nothing to obtain their brand of justice even if it meant working outside of the boundaries of the law such…
Jess (Katee Sackhoff, “Oculus”), a reformed drug addict, is trying to reclaim her daughter Chloe (Lucy Boynton, “The Blackcoat’s Daughter”) from the children’s home. Chloe, still angry at the desertion years earlier, is in no hurry to return to her birth mother. Yet one night, after an adventure gone wrong with her boyfriend, Chloe becomes…
