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“You are not a wolf”, imparts enigmatic operative Alejandro to relatively green FBI agent Kate Macer, as if she didn’t already know. “Sicario” is composed of wolves, and the precarious realm in which they exist requires a certain moral flexibility that Macer doesn’t seem to possess. After discovering dozens of corpses encapsulated in the walls of an […]
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A couple scenes from Eli Roth’s newest (but not so new, as it was caught in distributor purgatory for a while) splatterfest, “The Green Inferno”, oddly recall the meat-tossing bit from 1994’s “PCU”, a slacker comedy condemning half-cocked, cause-of-the-week protesters seeking recognition for their “awareness” and advocating the “anti-protesters” who torment them. A far worse fate awaits […]
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The new gangster biopic “Black Mass” is a great opportunity for another extensive Johnny Depp transformation, but I’d take his more engaging “Donnie Brasco” any day of the week. In both films, as in most mob pictures, the concept of loyalty is front and center: in “Brasco”, Depp’s real-life deep cover agent was conflicted over […]
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To this day, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s best work remains 1999’s “The Sixth Sense”, a film by which most supernatural suspense flicks are still measured. That same year, another bench mark movie was released, “The Blair Witch Project” from Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, which hit box office gold by way of the found footage medium, planting a new sub […]
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When in doubt, fly a helicopter into a building, because you might take out a few bad guys and win the movie. That’s the standard of logic behind director Aleksander Bach’s sequel/reboot of 2007’s “Hitman”, which is loosely adapted from the IO Interactive video game series of flagging popularity. It might be its most laughably […]
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Good evening, Mr. Hunt. 36 hours ago, there was a breach in our military’s communication network. Now, an emerging terror organization known as The Syndicate has control over our entire drone fleet. Their targets: Unknown. Your mission, should you choose to accept it… — the closing “tape scene” of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol With those words, Impossible Mission Force (IMF) Agent […]
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“Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” has more than its share of clever ideas and death-defying stunts. Even before the opening credits, star Tom Cruise, consistently narrowing the divide between himself and the super spy that he’s portraying, clings to the side of a cargo plane as it makes a rather abrupt ascent from takeoff. Ethan […]
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“The Pitch Is Back.” So say the promotional materials for Pitch Perfect 2, the sequel to the sleeper hit from 2012 that captivated hearts and voices everywhere. If you missed it, here’s a slight recap: Pitch Perfect featured Anna Kendrick as Beca, an introvert in her first year at fictional Barden University, who breaches her […]
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During the opening sequence of “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, in which our mega-heroes lay siege to a compound belonging to the sinister Hydra organization in a fictitious Eastern European country, I had a vision of the film’s writer/director Joss Whedon playing maniacally with action figures in his parent’s’ basement while mouthing the characters’ frequent wisecracks at […]
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Isaac Asimov’s Zeroth Law of Robotics states: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” In the 2004 film very loosely based on (it actually says “suggested by,” not “based on” in the credits) Asimov’s I, Robot, we see the evolution of this Zeroth Law into something very […]
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