There are four words that everyone should know in their respective language: Don’t mess with mama. That goes for bears (or other wild animals) and in this particular case, Halle Berry (Oscar winner, “Monster’s Ball”). Berry returns to the screen with Kidnap, an action-thriller about a blue-collar mother who does everything she can to get…
If there was one word that could accurately describe all the different aspects of Dave Made a Maze, that word would be “creative.” Far too many films lack originality, instead choosing to churn out tried-and-tested formulas that typically do well at the box office, so it’s truly refreshing to come across a directorial debut that…
Never Let Go should have been jettisoned before it even got past the pitch meeting. Borrowing from an endless supply of 80s-era Cold War thrillers, Never Let Go makes the crucial mistake of combining lame acting, a nonsense script, and boring musical choices into an utterly forgettable — if unintentionally hilarious — action movie. Angela…
Gridlock is a 20-minute tension-filled short built entirely from top to bottom on the hope that its twist ending can shock its audience. Everything filters through to that ending via a threadbare plot that sees a father lose his daughter in a traffic jam on a rural road surrounded by forest. The dad (Moe Dunford,…
Time to head to port. Now. With its “final adventure” tag, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales glows with a compelling enough reason to re-rendezvous with Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, “Alice Through the Looking Glass”), omitting how it will reward attendance with hollowed-out booty. Though ridding the stifled scope and static…
Matthew McConaughey (“Interstellar”) stars in Gold, a dreary rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags tale directed by Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”) that, while the Academy Award-winning actor (for “Dallas Buyers Club”) gives a passionate, above average performance (along with a perky Bryce Dallas Howard, “Pete’s Dragon”) in, the narrative of a 1980s mining company striking it rich is often muddled and…
“I am convinced there will be mutual understanding among human beings . . . in spite of all the suffering, the blood, the broken glass” — Pablo Neruda, Memoirs If the genre known as bio-pic has evolved into a predictable linear account of a well-known person’s life, Chilean director Pablo Larraín (“Jackie”) has turned the…
