Author Archive
SXSW Film Review – The Trust
What starts as a quirky buddy cop story about two guys trying to game the system turns into a tale of dark obsession in The Trust. Coming in at a just about Direct-to-Video level, Jim Stone (Nicolas Cage) a Las Vegas police officer in charge…
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SXSW Film Review – Operation Avalanche
Ambition starts as farce and leads to conspiratorial designs in this quasi-mockumentary thriller from actor/director Matt Johnson. Playing with the conceit of one of the biggest conspiracy theories of our time, Operation Avalanche begins with a group of young CIA agents working in the Audio/Video…
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Film Review – London Has Fallen
There’s a moment early into the action in London Has Fallen where the film’s hero Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) executes a bad guy in an isolated situation. President of the United States, Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) is watching Banning as he does this and responds with…
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Film Review – Hail, Caesar!
Hollywood’s golden era was famously controlled by giant production studios that lorded over their workers as if within fictitious fiefdoms of entertainment and prestige. Studios like MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) hired people known as fixers to maintain a positive public image of the people they employed by…
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Film Review – Hitchcock/Truffaut
Film lovers are a varied bunch with the medium being a subjective experience that allows for every opinion to have its own perspective. And while it’s hard to find a movie to objectively agree on, it’s probably equally as hard to objectively disagree that one…
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Film Review – Mojave
An angry white man of privilege decides to go the desert to work out some issues when he sparks a cat and mouse rivalry with a drifter in writer, director William Monahan’s Mojave. Best known for his screenplay for The Departed (2006), previously wrote and…
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Film Review – 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
“This is a true story,” are the words that open director Michael Bay‘s latest phantasmagoria of gorgeous violence and shoddy politics. It’s a not very subtle way to start a not very subtle film that centers on a hot button topic that’s held some domination…
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Film Review – Carol
When two women meet and fall in love in New York in the late 1940s, societal deviance becomes a search for safety in director Todd Hayne‘s (Safe, Mildred Pierce) latest movie Carol. Based on the novel The Price of Salt and starring Cate Blanchett and…
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