As Arthurian films have gone in recent years, the most epic in my opinion is probably “Excalibur” from 1981; the most interesting one is the 1995 Richard Gere vehicle, “First Knight”; the most fun was the 1963 animated “The Sword in the Stone”; while the best is easily 1975’s classic, “Monty Python and the Holy…
Few may realize that Going in Style is actually a remake of a 1979 film starring Academy Award winners George Burns (“The Sunshine Boys”) and Art Carney (“Harry and Tonto”) and an Oscar nominee, Lee Strasberg (“The Godfather Part 2”). The tale in that film has three senior citizens who share a small apartment in…
This mediocre captivity-and-ordeal thriller, Valley of Ditches, is bound up in some atmospheric visuals and moody dark ambient music, but it’s too vague and too shallow to make a real impact. Its initially bold premise soon gives way to repetition — and frankly the simple hope that none of the characters will utter any more…
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…
Over two decades ago, the British film scene was drastically up-rooted and challenged by the likes of an ambitious, dangerously addictive film centered on a closely knit group of Scottish junkies. That, and dead head-twisting babies crawling on ceilings. Danny Boyle’s on-screen adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting” was a definite first in venturing into explicit…
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…
