[6] Clint Eastwood tackles one of the most hackneyed of all movie subgenres, the race-the-clock death row rescue thriller, and breathes at least enough life into it to keep you engaged. Isaiah Washington puts in a good performance as the innocent man sentenced to die. His scenes with his wife (Lisa Gay Hamilton) and daughter are the movie’s best. The cast also features Denis Leary, …
[7] Gregory Peck plays a prosecutor terrorized by Robert Mitchum, a recently released convict Peck sent to prison eight years ago. Director J. Lee Thompson (Guns of Navarone) takes his cues from Hitchcock and crafts a film that can compete with much of Hitch’s work (it helps to have Bernard Herrmann doing the music.) The censors put just enough of a damper on the film …
[7] Monica Belluci and Vincent Cassel star in Gaspar Noe’s brutally graphic exploration of rape and revenge told in reverse. The subject matter is worth exploring and the narrative device is interesting, especially toward the end, which carries the full weight of the film’s character development. It makes you look back over everything you just saw and reinterpret it. I just wish the camera weren’t …
[4] Humphrey Bogart defends a juvenile delinquent (John Derek) in this uneven and heavy-handed flick from director Nicholas Ray. Didn’t care for Derek in this movie, but Bogey makes a nice courtroom stand at the end. The best thing about this movie is that it probably inspired Ray to continue exploring similar themes in his later, greater Rebel Without a Cause. With George Macready.
[6] Ryan Gosling plays a young prosecutor pitted against slicker-than-snot Anthony Hopkins, representing himself in a trial where he’s accused of murdering his wife. Hopkins is about to get away with everything, but Gosling is determined to poke a hole in Hopkins’ seemingly air-tight alibi. The casting is safe and predictable, but the script is fairly tight and twisty, and kept me engaged to the end. With …
[6] Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara star in the second adaptation of the Stieg Larsson novel about a journalist and a computer hacker who work to solve the mystery of a missing woman. Is there perhaps something wrong with the fact that The Social Network is more exciting than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? People looking at computer monitors and holding board meetings shouldn’t be …
[7] Elijah Wood and Charlie Hunnam star in this story about a wrongfully-expelled college student who falls into the dangerous British subculture of football ‘hooliganism’. The closest thing we have in America are street gangs, but the British ‘hooligans’ are a little more organized and revolve around football (soccer in America). Wood plays the disenfranchised student while Hunnam plays a higher up in the Green Street Elite …
[8] Ryan Gosling channels his inner Eastwood in this stylish thriller about a Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver. The combination of Hossein Amini’s emotionally restrained script and Nicolas Winding Refn’s visceral direction are a winning combination, boosted tremendously by Newton Thomas Sigel’s crisp, colorful cinematography and Cliff Martinez’s minimalist, evocative score. Gosling’s screen presence can never be disputed after this film. Like …
[8] Looper is a mash-up of mobster movie and sci-fi time travel flick, but rather than getting caught up in its own clever twists on a (let’s face it) hackneyed sci-fi sub-genre, the movie is wisely more concerned with creating an emotionally gripping story. It moves and builds perfectly, dividing your empathy for its fully-fleshed characters in a story that shuns black and white to …
[6] This light-hearted murder mystery isn’t likely to stick in your memory, but should satisfy Errol Flynn fans well enough. Flynn plays an author who writes under a secret identity — so secret even his wife and mother don’t realize it is he who is responsible for a scandalous novel that has recently put polite society up in arms. As life imitates art, Flynn finds …
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