A seductive stranger prowls the streets of Glasgow in search of prey: unsuspecting men who fall under her spell.
Seduction A fair enough way to divide filmviewers is between those that come for a coherent sequence of facts (to call a story) and those that come for an experience induced by any means. Most films address both communities, but grand experiments in contrasting the two...
Poor Planning So the overarching narrative here is that our scam artist planned this to the last detail while in the slammer. With the main trilogy, we never know, but the impression is that Danny and co agily adjust as difficulties and exceptions appear. The fun...
A man who suffers visions of an apocalyptic deluge takes measures to protect his family from the coming flood.
Extended Myth, Extensible Missus The last 40 minutes of this is a shift from epic to soap opera. Future viewers would be best advised to stop watching once the flood hits and the villains (but one) have been destroyed. Until that point, we have the sort...
The true life story of Margaret Rutherford (1892-1972) is in fact much more eccentric than the most famous fictional role she ever played: Miss Jane Marple, Agatha Christie's amateur sleuth. Rutherford's version was the very first appearance of Miss Marple on the big screen and it was far removed though from the petite, upper middle-class lady in the detective novels.
Unembellishments If you just come to this without the Christie context, you will be appalled. If you come understanding Christie, you will be doubly appalled. Here we have a quirky actress who plays a single quirky character. The character has some appeal in most of the...
Appropriated Appropriateness One measure of a science fiction movie is whether the science and fiction are coherent. I’ve been following the Hunger Games saga and this is driving me crazy. Some technology is advanced, some adopted from the sixties. In good hands, like with Nolan’s Interstellar,...
A struggling screenwriter inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends kidnap a gangster's beloved Shih Tzu.
Counted Only Two I guess this was inevitable. I haven’t yet seen the latest Tarantino faux western, but chose to see this instead. Roughly speaking, it is what used to be called a spoof, before referencing, extending and adding a meta level became permissible. What impresses me...
Intelligent Agency I was impressed by a few features of the first one. Most notably, it was a risk for them to adopt and extend a certain cinematic technique in such a high risk project. I wrote about the effect: having battle scenes with only a...
Lauren and Ned are engaged, they are in love, and they have just ten days to find Lauren’s mother who has gone AWOL somewhere in the remote far north of Australia, reunite her parents and pull off their dream wedding.
Companion as Place Why does this earn a special space in my heart? It is a romantic comedy after all, deliberately designed to be discarded. The genre is defined by the attractiveness of a superficial love; the easy way problems are resolved and the balance of...
The sensational details of a gruesome murder in The Daily Gazette have London in a panic, as a blood-thirsty madman - more vicious than Jack the Ripper - preys upon the city. Of greater concern to Scotland Yard, however, is that the account of the murder was published nearly two hours prior to the crime having been committed! Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson - the Great Detective and his faithful assistant and chronicler - find themselves challenged with one of their most baffling cases - "The Case of the Woman Who Was Murdered Tomorrow"! Will an innocent man be sent to the gallows? How much blood will be shed before a scarred fiend is brought to justice? ...And who are the mysterious Shadow Watchers, a coven of ominous figures who orchestrate terror from within the darkness? Starring Anthony D.P. Mann as Holmes and Terry Wade as Dr. Watson, "Sherlock Holmes and the Shadow Watchers" is a horrifying new adventure, produced with the kind permission of the Conan Doyle Estate*.
Fiddling Around When you get something like this, you have to give allowances. No money was spent; friends did the acting. Production is brusque. What you have to look for is the intent of the writer/director/main actor. If he could have, would he have delivered a...
Thirty years after defeating the Galactic Empire, Han Solo and his allies face a new threat from the evil Kylo Ren and his army of Stormtroopers.
Han Shoots Last Movies can do a lot of different things for us, from giving us 90 minutes away from stress to providing a skeleton on which we build lives. The films that matter to me are these latter ones. Much of what we think of...
