A mild-mannered college professor is driven to distraction when he encounters someone who looks exactly like him in Enemy. History professor Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) lives a very mundane, ordered life. Every day is pretty much routine until a colleague recommends a film that sounds curiously compelling to him. Later that evening, Bell is stunned […]
It’s a testament to the involvement that I felt in a movie about fast cars and racing that I left the theater and found myself pushing a little harder on the gas pedal. I’ll admit that Need for Speed had that effect on me, and so did some of the better movies in this genre, […]
Liam Neeson has had some incredible success with action films in the Taken movies, so it’s no surprise that he would want to keep this ball rolling as long as he can. I think that my fellow reviewer, Rich Heimlich, assured that Non-Stop would be an in-flight disaster when he remarked in The Year in […]
A sly but well-meaning insurance salesman is spellbound by his attraction for the calculating wife of one of his clients in Double Indemnity. This classic film from 1944 is one of the 10 films that famed movie critic Roger Ebert asked me to watch as part of a discussion on the differences between various types […]
A tactical mission in Afghanistan to eliminate a top Taliban target goes awry in Lone Survivor. On June 11, 1963, a Vietnamese monk sat down at a busy Saigon intersection and chose to be burned alive as a protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. The monk sat motionless while he […]
A high-tech prison break professional takes on his latest client only to find out that, this time, it’s not just another job in Escape Plan. Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) is a dour security expert who literally wrote the book on breaking out of prisons. His company gets him set up with an alias fit for […]
An American cargo ship is boarded by Somali pirates who take its captain hostage in the true-life tale of Captain Phillips. In April of 2009, the Maersk Alabama set sail from Oman, Jordan, with 17,000 metric tons of cargo bound for Mombasa, Kenya. Their route took them directly through an area where Somali pirates had been known […]
A bright young Ivy Leaguer, in desperate need of tuition, turns to online gambling to raise the money but gets more than he bargained for in Runner Runner. Justin Timberlake plays Richie Furst, a Princeton student who’s as bright as they come but who doesn’t have most of the money to finish out the semester. […]
About halfway through watching Insidious: Chapter 2, I realized exactly how to think about this subgenre of horror movies. This sequel, the original Insidious, the recent The Conjuring and so many others are really the film equivalent of a walkthrough haunted house that you might visit around Halloween in sites across the country, including transformed amusement […]
A washed-up race car driver is forced to drive haphazardly around Bulgaria in order to help save the life of his kidnapped wife in the action film Getaway. Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke), living abroad in Bulgaria, returns home one day to find his apartment in shambles and his wife missing. Suddenly, his cell phone rings […]
A family reunion in a remote wooded home goes totally wrong when the group falls prey to a trio of masked intruders intent on killing them all in the horror film You’re Next. Out in the deep woods, a couple are brutally murdered in their upscale vacation home, and no one is around to notice. […]
I’m a huge horror fan, and I’ve seen it all — from the excruciating drill sequence in The Gates of Hell to the comedic stylings of Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street. It takes a lot to impress me in the horror genre, so when flicks like Scream or The Cabin in the Woods […]