Molly (Julia Batelaan, “Kill Mode”) is Max Rockatansky, Furiosa and Katniss Everdeen all rolled into one. Sounds pretty spectacular, right? While totally rad(iated) in concept, this micro-budget action epic, Molly, from directors Colinda Bongers and Thijs Meuwese is pretty unwatchable in execution. The setting is “Sunder Land,” which will greatly amuse fans of Northern English…
Following up from 2014’s urban actioner, “The Equalizer,” the blood-thirsty avenger/defender out to protect the vulnerable from predatory forces is back in fighting form in The Equalizer 2. Returning as Robert McCall, the former CIA-operative-turned-people-protector, is two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington and joining with him is director Antoine Fuqua (who directed the charismatic actor…
“Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home” — John Howard Payne The Smothers Brothers they are not. Brothers Eli (John C. Reilly, “Kong: Skull Island”) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix, “You Were Never Really Here”) Sisters, known to all as the Sisters Brothers, are deadly…
Caught between action flick thrills and hefty existential drama, Timothy Woodward Jr.’s film, Silencer, ends up in an unconvincing purgatory which neither excites or provokes. We open with a squad of US Marines in Iraq. It’s all radio banter and “Copy that!” and it looks like it’s been filmed with sunglasses over the lens, so…
“Scribbled, shot and cut by Giorgio Serafini,” read the titles at the end of The Executioners, as Tim Polecat’s jaunty song “Another Word for Hate” bounces on the soundtrack, as if what we just saw was all a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun. But there’s nothing fun about Serafini’s hateful home invasion horror movie. Four twenty-something…
It is a bold filmmaker who trusts film as film and allows the medium to communicate without recourse to exposition and dialogue. Such a filmmaker is Lynne Ramsey (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”), whose latest offering, You Were Never Really Here, is a brilliantly brutal assembly of image and sound that never displays any…
From Joe Lynch, director of “Everly,” comes Mayhem, an ugly mishmash of the zombie apocalypse and tower assault subgenres. Unwisely referencing “A Clockwork Orange” in the opening, with Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie” overlaid on some stylized ultra-violence, Derek (Steven Yeun, “Okja”) explains the “IV7” virus via narration. It’s a condition which purportedly causes the sufferer…
