[8] Writer/director John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Lawn Dogs) takes an earnest and engaging stab at the ‘boy meets girl and falls in love’ narrative with Flirting. Noah Taylor stars as an ostracized Australian boarding school student in the 1950s who becomes infatuated with a new Ugandan student (Thandie Newton) from a nearby girls’ school. As the two avoid their headmasters for clandestine …
[8] Alec Baldwin takes on the mantle of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan in the action-thriller The Hunt for Red October. One of the joys of this movie is seeing Baldwin, previously known mostly for co-starring in Beetlejuice, become a leading man before your very eyes. And a smart one, at that. Sharing the screen with him is Sean Connery as a Russian captain whose new …
[8] If you told me I’d enjoy a movie about a unabashed gold-digger and her showgirl best friend traveling to Paris while trying to pull the wool over the eyes of a private detective attempting to catch one of them in an act of infidelity to his client’s son — I’d have said probably not. But it turns out the gold-digger is played by the …
[8] Behold the glory of Barbara Stanwyck. One of classic Hollywood’s sassiest broads makes a big splash in this early talkie that’s leagues ahead of other early 30s flicks in terms of story, craftsmanship, and performance. Babs plays a “party girl” (we know them as escorts now) who serendipitously winds up hitching a ride in the middle of the night with a fuddy-duddy artist. Both …
[8] In this Spanish film from writer/director AgustÃn Villaronga, a Nazi child killer is put in an iron lung after a botched suicide attempt. His wife hires a young male nurse to take care of him, but the young man becomes increasingly unhinged as he reads through the Nazi’s diaries. Once the caregiver begins re-enacting some of the Nazi’s crimes and winning over the affection …
[8] With this reinvention of Universal’s classic monster movie, writer/director Leigh Whannell (Saw, Dead Silence) delivers a superbly crafted thriller anchored by a compelling performance from Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale). Moss plays a battered woman who escapes her all-controlling boyfriend only to learn that he has taken his own life. She grows suspicious about his death when a strange presence begins to haunt her. …
[8] Writer/director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall) and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns bring us back to the trenches of World War I with the harrowing journey of two British officers tasked with traversing enemy territory to deliver a message that will save 1,600 of their fellow soldiers from certain death — including one of the young men’s brothers. 1917 is compelling on two different levels, infusing …
[8] If someone is going to pick up Louisa May Alcott’s much-loved literary classic, dust it off, and serve up a retelling, let it be the Oscar-nominated writer/director of Lady Bird. Greta Gerwig is respectably faithful to the material, but bold in her decision to dice the story up and deliver it in non-linear fashion. In Gerwig’s adaptation, we experience the aftermath of the March …
[8] I think one of the hardest stories to tell is a good murder mystery story. That’s why we see so few of them turned into movies. Rian Johnson’s (The Last Jedi, Looper) Knives Out is a beguiling blend of classic and farce, reminding me at times of both Clue and Murder on the Orient Express. Remarkably, its dark comedy never undercuts its dramatic tension. …
[8] I am not a fan of car racing. I couldn’t care less about it, really. But like so many other great sports movies, Ford v Ferrari isn’t really about the sport itself. It’s about the people engaged in the sport. And to that extent, director James Mangold (Logan, Walk the Line) hits a home run with this true story about two men who overcome …
Copyright © 2025 | Theme by MH Themes