[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 …
[7] Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones) stars as a mysterious teenager raised in the wilderness by her ex-CIA father (Eric Bana) to be a lethal killing machine. Director Joe Wright steps out of his comfort zone (his previous films include Atonement and Pride & Prejudice) to deliver a stylish thriller galvanized by terrific performances from Ronan and Cate Blanchett, whose never been sexier or scarier …
[4] Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster star in this sci-fi thriller about astronauts who awaken from hypersleep with total memory loss. The filmmakers are hellbent on keeping everything mysterious to the very end: where are we? who are we? what are we doing? I’m all for a good mystery, but you have to give me something or someone to care about while you leave me …
[6] Blake Lively stars in this claustrophobic thriller about a woman trapped by a great white shark in a shallow ocean cove. Director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan, House of Wax) captures the beauty of the Australian surroundings (passing for Mexico in the movie) and gives us some cool surfboarding footage before the shark fin disrupts the peace. The Shallows is at its best when Collet-Serra is winding …
[4] I thought the first Conjuring movie was moderately entertaining (for a warmed-up rehash of horror cliches), and was hoping for an improvement the second time around. The sequel could have entertained me by being more about Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), the paranormal investigators who can’t stop helping haunted families even when their aid poses psychic threats to their own lives. …
[7] After witnessing a murder, a punk band gets trapped by skinheads at a rural dive bar in this survival/revenge tale from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin). Anton Yelchin (from the Star Trek and Fright Night remakes) and Imogen Poots play two of the band members, and Patrick Stewart lends gravitas as the white supremacist club owner. Stewart is icy-cool and effective here, a much …
[6] Mira Sorvino, Jeremy Northam, Josh Brolin, and Charles S. Dutton star in this creature feature about evolved cockroaches that threaten to overtake New York City. Director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) admits that the film’s narrative was watered down by a series of studio concessions, but it still highlights his visual flair and palpable atmosphere. The creature work is an admirable combination of puppetry …
[6] Matt Reeves, the director of Cloverfield, makes the second stab at John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel about a twelve-year-old boy who unwittingly befriends a vampire girl. (A Swedish film version, Let the Right One In, was released in 2008.) The remake bends the material more toward an American sensibility, and as a result the American version is of course faster-paced, less nuanced, and far less …
[4] In this fourth installment (and final, by my count) of the disaster franchise, George Kennedy returns to pilot a super-sonic plane to Paris. Trouble is, the bad guy (Robert Wagner) wants to blow the plane out of the sky to stop an on-board news reporter (Susan Blakely) from uncovering his corporate shenanigans. For the most part, the Airport movies are a guilty pleasure, but …
[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 …
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