A knight framed for a tragic crime teams with a scrappy, shape-shifting teen to prove his innocence.
Your Local Manager came to this with kids, not knowing anything. The story is ordinary, with features borrowed from a familiar bucket. But it had energy, massive energy in more than one dimension. The title character, the city backgrounds, and most particularly the camera —...
A rich man learns about a guru who can see without using his eyes. He sets out to master the skill in order to cheat at gambling.
Shifting of Equalities have all watched as Wes moved more and more toward where he finds his soul as a storyteller — a constant movement toward what we have here, powerful enough to earn a place on my list of ‘fours’. Depending on when you...
Sons, Girls been an admirer of Kate for as long as she has been acting. Her style is consistent across projects, regardless of their quality. Spotless Mind and her Ophelia alone score a justified life. A woman like this wants better roles than the tide...
Dan Morgan is many things: a devoted husband, a loving father, a celebrated car salesman. He's also a former assassin. And when his past catches up to his present, he's forced to take his unsuspecting family on a road trip unlike any other.
Macho Sex is a content filler, with no ambition to be excellent in any of the categories it enters. Marky is to my mind a poor action figure for reasons that are uninteresting. The filmmakers just punched tickets on other elements just to have something...
When a tech blogger lands an interview with a tech guru and stops an attack on him, he finds a mysterious ring that takes him back 57 seconds into the past.
Circuit-Face are three layers to this thing. The first is our standard pop noir where an ordinary yobbo is plucked from life for in this case changing the world and winning the girl. There’s some silly science in there. Nothing interesting. Standard noir Voiceover narration. The...
A reclusive billionaire invites six seemingly random strangers to his island estate in the south of England. Aspiring detective Miranda Green finds the mysterious invitation too alluring to pass up. When another guest turns up dead, Miranda must get to the bottom of the malicious plot behind the gathering.
Hidden Fathers, Lost Mothers is a lesson in what not to do if you decide to milk instead of going a genre. The genre of course is defined by Agatha Christie. In its pure form is has a remote location, a murder, and then others,...
A mild-mannered professor moonlighting as a fake hit man in police stings ignites a chain reaction of trouble when he falls for a potential client.
Explicitness Kills I have learned about effective introspection in film is that the least acknowledged is the most effective. Two extremes may be “Under the Skin” or “Pillow Book” or even “In the Mood for Love” at one successful end and this at the other....
Celebrated sleuth Hercule Poirot, now retired and living in self-imposed exile in Venice, reluctantly attends a Halloween séance at a decaying, haunted palazzo. When one of the guests is murdered, the detective is thrust into a sinister world of shadows and secrets.
The Influence of Inscrutability Christie based films are a sort of bellwether for me. I think the most important trend in our culture just now is how we play with awareness. The most obvious and experimental centre for that is long form film. The most...
Peter Quill, still reeling from the loss of Gamora, must rally his team around him to defend the universe along with protecting one of their own. A mission that, if not completed successfully, could quite possibly lead to the end of the Guardians as we know them.
Experiments On my side, it is all about affordances. Usually I choose a film and allocate the time because I seek affordances for better living in my life. Narrative is all about affordance: what changes in the story, with mysteries and power that I can be...
A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people.
Little Men story is frippery. The tone light, but not as light as advertised. Action and effects are as expected and no more. What was remarkable to this viewer were a few of the character backstories. Our hero’s story was ordinary. A petty theft got his wife...