[7] Emile Hirsch and Kieran Culkin put in great performances in this odd coming-of-age film about best friends who are constantly rebelling against their Catholic school teacher, a one-legged nun played by Jodie Foster. I like that the characters, even Foster’s antagonistic one, aren’t one-sided. The film suggests the boys are out of control, but also that they have plenty to rebel against. I expected …
[5] While traveling through the desert, newlyweds pick up a car-wreck survivor who plunges them into a night of suspicion and suspense. Thomas Jane (The Mist, Hung) makes his directorial debut with Dark Country. On one hand, I admire his attempt to blend film noir with comic book aesthetics, but the movie relies on constant green-screen work that’s poorly executed. The script by Tab Murphy …
[7] While it lacks the pervasive chill that runs through The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon is a well-made thriller that engages from beginning to end, thanks to a briskly-paced script adaptation by Ted Tally (who won an Oscar for his treatment of Lambs). This is a prequel to the time Lecter met Starling, and also a re-make of Michael Mann’s stylish 1986 film …
[6] Jennifer Connelly plays a woman wrongfully evicted from her home. Before she can go through the proper channels to get it back, Ben Kingsley and his family have already moved in. That’s when The House of Sand and Fog turns into a tug of war between the characters that spirals quickly and tragically out of control. At first, I thought this was going to …
[8] Martin Scorsese unleashes this epic tale of 1860s New York City street battles, with Leonardo DiCaprio starring as a young man with a vendetta against the near legendary Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). See, DiCaprio’s character saw Day-Lewis’s character kill his father in the big opening battle scene, and then DiCaprio’s character goes away for a while. Once he’s of age, he comes back …
[7] Actor Bill Paxton makes his feature directorial debut with Frailty, in which a man recounts to an FBI agent how, as a boy, his religious-freak father forced him and his young brother to help murder alleged ‘demons’ and bury their bodies. Matthew McConaughey plays the storyteller, Powers Boothe plays the FBI agent, and Bill Paxton plays the scary dad in the flashback-driven half of …
[8] A 14-year-old goes home with a guy in his 30s. What follows is a nightmarish power struggle. Hard Candy is an intense character-driven thriller that succeeds primarily for the incredible performances of Patrick Wilson (Watchmen) and Ellen Page (Juno). The screenplay dives into murky moral waters, asking us to empathize with a young girl who inflicts torture and a grown man who may or …
[8] Frank Darabont dives back into the Stephen King well and comes out with a winner. The Mist is about a disparate group of people who end up trapped together in the local grocery store when a strange, scary mist suddenly engulfs the town. Anyone who travels out into the mist is killed by mysterious, unseen creatures. In addition to the apocalyptic angle, you can …
[8] Neil Marshall follows up his auspicious feature directorial debut, Dog Soldiers, with this all-female plunge into the claustrophobic depths of Appalachian caves. The Descent reminds me of From Dusk Til Dawn in that it’s really two completely different movies jammed together at the middle. The first half is harrowing enough just watching the women climb, crawl and wiggle their way deeper and deeper into …
[8] This monster movie from the creators of Lost and Felicity combines low-budget ingenuity with high-budget production values for a thrilling movie going experience. The whole film is hand-held ‘found footage’ documenting a group of friends’ attempted escape from Manhattan after the city is attacked by a raging leviathan. The monster’s design is fresh and original, and the young cast do very good jobs running …
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