Mandy stars Nicolas Cage, with Andrea Riseborough as his wife, the two of them living a lumberjack’s life in the Pacific Northwest in 1983. Intercut with scenes of their idyllic existence, reading fantasy novels and talking about which planets are their favorites, are scenes of a cult leader (Linus Roache) and his dimwit followers occupying the […]
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Twenty years after Rounders’ release, the gambling narrative remains applicable in a world of post-20th-century hustlers. Written by the creative team behind Showtime’s Billions (Brian Koppelman and David Levien), John Dahl’s film captures the spirit of underground poker and the skillset needed for high stakes, face-to-face Texas Hold ‘Em competitions. In today’s world of FanDuel, […]
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In yet another Death Wish update teaching the valuable lesson that violence is the answer, Peppermint presents Jennifer Garner as Riley North, a Los Angeles woman who seeks revenge after her husband (Jeff Hephner) and little girl (Cailey Fleming) are killed by Mexican gangbangers. To prove the point, Riley and the girl have a scene early on […]
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You know how sometimes a horror movie will have various creepy apparitions, and how it doesn’t really matter why those particular images were chosen, the point is just to be creepy? But then you know how sometimes a horror movie makes a lot of money, so Warner Bros. commissions sequels and prequels and spinoffs to […]
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Arizona is a dark horror/comedy set after the housing collapse in 2009, an era that ought to have inspired more dark horror/comedies than it has. It stars Rosemarie DeWitt as a divorced mom in an Arizona suburb who’s about to lose her house while still working for the sleazy realtor (Seth Rogen) who sold it to […]
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Cold Skin starts with the Nietzsche quote about how monster-hunters must beware lest they become monsters themselves, staring into the abyss may result in the abyss staring back at you, yada yada. It’s pretty on-the-nose for the story that ensues, which is based on a novel by Albert Sánchez Piñol and directed by Xavier Gens (Hitman), […]
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This weekend, the female guerrilla rises again with the release of Peppermint, the story of a woman who wakes from a coma to get jacked and find the people who killed her family. Peppermint, aka Riley North (aka Jennifer Garner), hunts down and kills a lot of bad guys with knives, guns, and her bare […]
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We’ve hit sort of a dry spell in the horror field these past few weeks. Not much in the way of theatrical releases, although you can still catch The Meg (Eric’s review) if the idea of Jason Statham beating up a prehistoric shark sounds amusing. (It is.) New on DVD, we got the quietly awesome […]
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When teenage Margot (Michelle La) goes missing, her widowed father, David (John Cho), with whom she has always enjoyed a close relationship, realizes he doesn’t actually know any of her friends and has no idea where to start looking. Thus Searching is about a parent’s nightmare, made worse (like most things) by the internet, which proves to be […]
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All is tranquil at the beginning of We the Animals before it evolves into a gentle, aching coming-of-age story for 10-year-old Jonah (Evan Rosado), who will soon learn that you have to take the moments of joy wherever you can find them. Up till now, it seemed like everything was joy. Jonah, an introspective boy who […]
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Anarchic cartoons like the old Warner Bros. and Fleischer Studios shorts are always popular with children (even if many of them were not originally written for them) because they appeal to the fantasy of control. Children are not in control of their day-to-day lives, and these cartoons allow them to fantasize about a world where […]
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