Halloween Kills In 1978, John Carpenter set the horror genre on its ears with his seminal “Halloween,” the story of a mass murderer who terrorizes a family and the sleepy town of Haddonfield, IL. In 2018, David Gordon Green added a fresh spin on the Halloween franchise, with its twelfth entry, “Halloween,” a solid continuation [...]
The Last Duel The Fox – Disney merger left several projects in limbo as Disney either axed or moved projects to streaming platforms. One surviving project is the 2021 adaptation of Eric Jager’s The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial by Combat in Medieval France, named “The Last Duel,” produced and directed by Sir [...]
Ron’s Gone Wrong As we’ve learned over the years, both in the news and in the fictional world, when technology falls into the wrong hands, lousy happenstance occurs to innocent people. Think about Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman in “WarGames.” He may have been a socially awkward teenager who hacked his way into a military computer, [...]
No Time to Die Roguish. Devilishly Handsome. Well-Built. Capable of handling himself. These are the marks of an actor who can step into the shoes of the world’s most famous secret agent and defend that world against nefarious villains, sipping a martini in one hand and a beautiful woman in the other. In 2005, the [...]
A fine line exists between statement movies and movies that contain a statement. Now streaming on Amazon Prime, Blumhouse Television is back this year with “Welcome To The Blumhouse,” a continuing anthology of horror films. The first two in the lineup are varied in their approaches to gentrification, with characters standing their ground, with solid [...]
Cry Macho Let’s set aside the fact that Clint Eastwood is 91 this year for the moment. “Cry Macho,” which hits theaters and HBO Max today, was not Eastwood’s first rodeo with this material. The script for “Cry Macho” goes all the back to the early ’70s when the screenplay, then known as “Macho,” was [...]
Copshop When I think of director Joe Carnahan, I vividly remember the short film “Ticker” from the BMW Film Series, “The Hire” featuring Clive Owen. It was a slick short featuring Clive Owen. Carnahan would go on to write and direct “Smokin’ Aces,” which is another action farce that I enjoyed. Carnahan is back in [...]
Paul Schrader has made for himself a long and distinguished career in television and films, most notably “Taxi Driver,” which celebrates its 45th anniversary this year, “Raging Bull,” and 2018’s “First Reformed” amongst other films. Each film in his oeuvre has featured a character study set against the backdrop of a slow-burning story that tantalizes [...]
Lisa Joy’s directorial debut, “Reminiscence,” is the type of film the major studios would have released in the 1990s or early aughts, appealing to adults without spending a fortune on the budget. The movie hits theaters and HBO Max today. Hugh Jackman plays Nick Bannister, a private investigator using technology to scan people’s minds for [...]
“I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” ~ Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass." As a kid, I can remember watching Martha Coolidge's "Real Genius," looking through the cathode ray tube screen at Val Kilmer's antics and [...]
