[7] Cary Grant stars as an ex-jewel thief trying to clear his name after precious jewels start disappearing in the French Riviera. This outing for Alfred Hitchcock succeeds more in character than in suspense set pieces, though you’ll get some of that, too. Grace Kelly plays a socialite who falls in love with Grant, even though she suspects him of stealing her mother’s jewels. The …
[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 …
[4] Peter Hyams (Capricorn One, The Relic) tackles Arthur C. Clarke’s sequel novel. It is, of course, a fool’s errand to follow so closely in the footsteps of Stanley Kubrick and his revolutionary and revered 2001: A Space Odyssey, but for whatever reason, that errand was run. And for a while, 2010‘s not so bad. 2001 leaves a lot of mystery in its wake, so …
[6] After a car accident, a young woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) finds herself prisoner in an underground survivalist bunker where a creepy John Goodman convinces her that the world has been invaded by either Soviets or aliens, and that if they open the bunker door, they’ll soon be dead from toxins in the air. The script does a more convincing job than me in making …
[6] The Coen Brothers are at it again, this time with a wonky tale of 1950s Hollywood studio politics mixed with political scandal. Hail, Caesar! is scattershot in its narrative. Josh Brolin’s character is marginally the main protagonist. Brolin plays a gruff studio executive who can barely keep all of his stars and starlets in line while another job offer tempts him away from the …
[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 …
[4] Julianne Moore stars as a psychiatrist who discovers the multiple personalities of a patient are actually murder victims. Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors) plays the patient, and normally I love these two leading actors. But we’ve seen Moore do this kind of thing before and Rhys Meyers never quite convinces me that he’s not just showing off with all the different accents and quirky …
[5] George Clooney and Cate Blanchett star in Steven Soderbergh’s homage to war-time film noir, right down to the black and white 4×3 Academy aspect ratio. Clooney plays an American military journalist who tries to figure out who shot his driver (Tobey Maguire) in Berlin, after Germany fell but before the atomic bomb. Then Clooney discovers he and Maguire have bedded the same woman, a …
[7] Seven adults are called together to vanquish a demon clown they defeated as children thirty years ago. This three-hour miniseries based on Stephen King’s beloved novel is directed by Tommy Lee Wallace (Halloween III: Season of the Witch) and features TV stars John Ritter (Three’s Company), Harry Dean Anderson (Night Court), and Richard Thomas (The Waltons), along with Annette O’Toole, Tim Reid, Dennis Christopher, …
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