[7] Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days, Near Dark) directs this Cold War-era true story starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson as Soviet officers aboard Russia’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Moscow orders the ship to launch a nuclear missile to let America know they are within striking distance. After the successful launch, however, the vessel suffers a nuclear meltdown that threatens to kill all those aboard and potentially …
[6] Liam Neeson stars as an ex-CIA operative who pursues sex traffickers in Paris to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Taken opens with twenty minutes of clunky, expository screenwriting before Neeson is allowed to kick things into high gear. He single-handedly rescues this formula potboiler with a performance of fierce determination. Not since the likes of Clint Eastwood has an actor threatened to find and kill …
[6] Cillian Murphy stars a young trans-woman who leaves Ireland in the 1970s to find her birth mother in London. Along the way, she has flings with a singer (Gavin Friday) and a comic magician (Stephen Rea), rough encounters with the IRA and London police, and an unexpected reconciliation with her birth father. Breakfast on Pluto reunites director Neil Jordan with material involving sexuality and …
[8] A bunch of British people fall in love, out of love, and do lovey-dovey things in the month leading up to Christmas. Now, if you’re like me, that’s a description that will keep you from ever wanting to watch Love Actually. But since a hundred different people have insisted I watch it over the last fifteen years since it was released, I finally gave …
[7] Steve McQueen (Shame, 12 Years a Slave) brings Lynda La Plante’s novel to the screen. Widows is about a woman who rallies the girlfriends and wives of her deceased husband’s gang of robbers, all of whom died in a botched robbery with her husband, to execute plans for what would have been their next heist. They all need to do this because their dead lovers …
[7] An ambitious fantasy adventure that throws a slew of familiar fantasy staples into a well trodden tale. But what it lacks in originality Krull makes up in style and spirit. Ken Marshall plays Colwyn, a young prince who must rescue his bride-to-be (Lysette Anthony) from a galactic Beast. Marshall brings a little Errol Flynn to the role, but the screenplay remains too superficially archetypal …
[6] This Dino DeLaurentiis production of the infamous tale of mutiny welcomes more shades of gray into the characters of Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian than the 1935 original film, though I wouldn’t say it’s a better film overall. Bligh and Christian are portrayed by Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson, respectively. Bligh is a more complicated and sympathetic character; Christian is a more blindly passionate …
[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 …
[6] It’s shiny and exciting to look at, a gorgeous smorgasbord of fantastic sets, wardrobe, make-up, and visual effects. But it’s also grotesquely over-produced, almost turning these assets into something garish and distracting. It’s a shame the considerable talents of Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Natalie Portman couldn’t be put to better use. All three appear insufferably constrained in their roles. Jake Lloyd as young …
[8] Writer/director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) takes on the life and work of sexual research pioneer Alfred Kinsey, whose teachings and publications caused a national uproar in the late ’40s and 50s. If you think America is sexually prudish and repressed now, try to imagine what it was like back in Kinsey’s day, with most people constantly wondering, “Am I normal?” Before the work …
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