If the title of the film Naked Singularity piques your interest, a brief investigation via your favorite search engine will reveal that it’s a term used in astrophysics to describe a theoretical phenomenon that may exist in black holes. But since this is a film review and not an entry for a layperson’s guide to…
Lance (Patrick Schwarzenegger, “Daniel Isn’t Real”), an unemployed college graduate travels to Chicago at the behest of a cousin and the promise of a job only to be drawn into a tight-knit cadre of millennials who express their frustrations at a broken system by robbing rich people. The viewpoint of these criminal masterminds is that…
What we find scary will vary enormously. For some it’s the supernatural, for others the psychological. We may be revolted by physical suffering or horrified by social oppression. The Owners is a film that capitalizes on multiple registers of fear to create an unsettling space, both within the framework of the film and more widely,…
Mike Gan’s Burn joins all those movies that exist solely in one location, movies like “Panic Room,” “Phone Booth” and “Grand Piano.” The greatest challenge with movies like this is that much of its success depends on the main protagonist. They need to carry the movie and compel our attention, since cinematography doesn’t play much…
It feels as if Michael Caine (“Going in Style”) has been making movies like King of Thieves for decades, movies in which is character is so, so old and so, so tired of it all. You’d be tired as well, if you had to work on movies like this. One last score, one last big…
Though an estranged family tackling a bank heist in order to save a sibling is a recipe for interesting discourses by way of “Dog Day Afternoon,” The Vault, unfortunately is not that kind of film. Dan Bush cut his teeth co-directing, co-writing and co-editing the extraordinarily effective thriller/horror “The Signal,” followed by the overlooked yet…
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…
