Home — Crooked Marquee

Review: <i>Escape from Pretoria</i> — Josh Bell

Review: Escape from Pretoria

Mar 4th, 2020

The inmates who break out of Pretoria Central Prison are imprisoned for their political activities, but the context is mostly irrelevant to Francis...

Review: <i>Carol of the Bells</i> — Josh Bell

Review: Carol of the Bells

Mar 3rd, 2020

Although he’s still best known for being John Travolta’s brother, for a while in the ’90s and ’00s Joey Travolta carved out a surprisingly...

Review: Swift

Feb 18th, 2020

There’s some sort of irony in Willem Dafoe providing the voice of a cartoon seagull just a few months after he so memorably appeared opposite a...

Review: <i>Camp Cold Brook</i> — Josh Bell

Review: Camp Cold Brook

Feb 11th, 2020

For a group of professional ghost hunters, the main characters in Camp Cold Brook are surprisingly unhappy to discover that the abandoned summer...

Review: <i>Come As You Are</i> — Josh Bell

Review: Come As You Are

Feb 11th, 2020

It would be easy for Come as You Are to turn into a cloying, condescending lecture about how the disabled are people, too, and there are times when...

Review: Cupid

Jan 29th, 2020

Christmas-themed horror movies have become a thriving subgenre in recent years, providing micro-budget horror filmmakers with easy subject matter...

Review: <i>The Rest of Us</i> — Josh Bell

Review: The Rest of Us

Jan 28th, 2020

If nothing else, the low-key Canadian drama The Rest of Us makes a surprisingly strong case for Heather Graham as a dramatic actor. Graham is...

Review: John Henry

Jan 21st, 2020

Despite his imposing physical presence, former football player Terry Crews has spent the majority of his acting career in comedic roles, where his...

Review: Get Gone

Jan 21st, 2020

Apparently starring in terrible VOD genre movies is becoming a family business, because both Nicolas Cage’s son and his nephew show up in Get...

Review: The Wave

Jan 14th, 2020

The opening scene of Gille Klabin’s The Wave promises an edgy head-trip of a movie, as main character Frank (Justin Long) describes a drug...

Review: <i>Disturbing the Peace</i> — Josh Bell

Review: Disturbing the Peace

Jan 14th, 2020

No matter how hard they work, Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, and John Travolta can only star in so many direct-to-VOD thrillers a year, so someone has...

Review: <i>Three Christs</i> — Josh Bell

Review: Three Christs

Jan 7th, 2020

It sounds like the set-up for a bad joke: Three Jesus Christs walk into a mental hospital, each claiming to be the real thing. But there’s nothing...

Josh Bell Says Don't Forget: <i>Fast Color</i> — Josh Bell

Josh Bell Says Don't Forget: Fast Color

Dec 23rd, 2019

The dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has essentially crowded out the kind of smaller-scale, diverse superhero stories that are more common...

Josh Bell Says Don't Forget: <i>Sweetheart</i> — Josh Bell

Josh Bell Says Don't Forget: Sweetheart

Dec 23rd, 2019

J.D. Dillard’s fascinating survival horror movie Sweetheart premiered at Sundance and was produced by the genre specialists at Blumhouse, who’ve...

Review: <i>Hell on the Border</i> — Josh Bell

Review: Hell on the Border

Dec 17th, 2019

A title card at the beginning of writer-director Wes Miller’s Western Hell on the Border laments the erasure of the black cowboy from popular...