adaptation
This review was timed to its release at the 2024 Cinequest Film Festival. It has since been retitled The Lost Daughter. Going into The Island Between Tides blind – not knowing its origins or anything outside a base plot description – allows this film’s mysteries and inner workings to be discovered with surprise. Conversely, knowing […]
Read More
When the original Mean Girls made its debut in April 2004, it found an audience eager for its classroom drama and its comedy which showed us at our backbiting worst. Twenty years on, its legacy can be found in the numerous “Get in, loser, we’re going _____” memes that pervade social media and the evergreen […]
Read More
The story of the Osage Indian Murders in the early 1900s is a ghastly reminder that greed destroys everyone in which it can find purchase. It is a demon that doesn’t stop coming, always perpetuating itself in one form or another. Fewer examples are more chilling than this spate of murders, the beneficiaries of which […]
Read More
The reason Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot series succeeds is through his portrayal of a man obsessed with the corporeal and his belief in human nature and its folly; no room can be made in his world for the supernatural or the impossible. He is the essence of what writer Christopher McQuarrie describes in his […]
Read More
There’s something different about the ethos which drives director/co-writer Scott Derrickson’s adaptation of Joe Hill’s short story, The Black Phone. It’s not here for gratuitous displays of gore, nor is its purpose to be content with merely scaring its audience (although there are some fairly good jump scares hidden throughout). Instead, The Black Phone rides […]
Read More
Let me get this out of the way: I have no attachments to the previous incarnations of Firestarter – neither Stephen King’s 1980 novel nor the 1984 filmed adaptation – in particular. The book was one of the first of his that I ever read, but I barely remember anything from it; I didn’t see […]
Read More
A children’s animated film which captures the snappy cool and dash of Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight and his Ocean’s Trilogy? I’m a sucker for heist films, so it’s not a question of “Sign me up,” but more “Give it to me. Now.” The Bad Guys – based on a series of children’s books by […]
Read More
The filmed version of In the Heights is an amped up, in-your-face, vibrant celebration of life. From the eye-popping choreography by Christopher Scott to the vivid photography by Alice Brooks capturing every nuance and bead of sweat dropped over a few of the hottest days in New York City, this film encompasses the greatest of our heart’s […]
Read More
(PLEASE NOTE: A significant plot detail is discussed in this review as a means of showing how this film differentiates itself from both the novel and its 1989 adaptation. Spoiler notices at the beginning and end of the paragraphs are included.) We each owe a death, there are no exceptions. — Stephen King, “The Green […]
Read More
Ron Howard’s new adaptation of Inferno, the fourth of author Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon mystery novels, has had me dizzy since I saw it. Not since Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers have I been subjected to so much rapid-fire editing, jarring blasts of noise on the film’s soundtrack, and the dreaded nauseating shakycam for that […]
Read More