Bruce Willis
The premise of Wire Room is certainly more interesting than its execution. A lone federal agent in a secure facility tries to prevent a surveillance target from being killed – it’s gold, bearing many opportunities to tell this story with meaning, purpose, and style. As it stands, though, we only have characters we don’t care […]
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Sometimes, it’s possible to be overwhelmed by being underwhelmed. Writer/director/star Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn – apparently a passion project for him since first reading the novel upon which it was based – strikes this curious tone, wanting to mean more and showing marvelous work underneath its ho-hum surface. Much of this comes from the sporadic […]
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Two words come to mind when thinking about First Kill; they’re two words that have gained traction of late, and I’m hesitant to use them. However, nothing can sum this movie up better than these two words, and they are “toxic masculinity.” It’s a fitting phrase which encompasses the learned behaviors of men who see […]
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Frank Miller’s sprawling tales of Sin City (that’s “Basin City” with the “Ba” shot to hell on the road sign at the city limits) are constructed from the hard-boiled and the heartbroken. The sleazy and the sordid. The soulless and the virtuous. The righteous and the wicked. As Denzel Washington said in the film Glory, […]
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A good sequel should expand upon the original, going places where the original didn’t go and further exploring its characters. Lazy sequels seem to merely take everything good about the original, repackage it with new locales and new actors, and hope to hell that some of us won’t notice that it’s same movie all over […]
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(This review was originally published on March 28, 2013 at Reel Film News) If I were to tell you about a movie in which the President of the United States is held hostage inside his own compound while a criminal mastermind has his way with our country’s nuclear arsenal, you might think I was rehashing […]
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(This review originally appeared at Reel Film News on February 14, 2013.) In 1979, author Roderick Thorp released a novel titled Nothing Lasts Forever, a story about ex-NYPD detective Joe Leland visiting his daughter in her high-rise office building during her Christmas party. The party is interrupted by terrorists with a heavy political agenda, and […]
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(This review was originally published on October 1, 2012 at Reel Film News) It speaks volumes for Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s agent that the actor has starred in the two best sci-fi action films of the past decade; first Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” in 2010 and now Rian Johnson’s “Looper”, which takes the concept of time travel into mind-bending […]
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(This review originally appeared at Reel Film News on September 28, 2012.) There are things I’d really like to write about Looper, yet I cannot, as I don’t want to spoil anything for you. Looper, as you may well know, is a time-travel movie having to do with criminal organizations from the future disappearing people […]
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