A small Midwestern town finds itself at the mercy of several catastrophic tornadoes in Into the Storm. Silverton High School is preparing for the graduation of its latest senior class. For the moment, the skies are clear, but rain looms on the horizon, threatening to dampen both the ground and the festive audience. Meanwhile, two […]
A reluctant drug mule gains incredible superpowers when she’s inadvertently exposed to the effects of a new drug in Lucy. An American woman living in Taiwan runs into an exasperated recent acquaintance. He implores Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) to deliver a mysterious briefcase to a third party at a nearby hotel. The hand off goes horribly wrong, ending with her abduction […]
A German intelligence officer searches for a Chechen immigrant whom he’s certain will lead him to a deeper terrorist network in A Most Wanted Man. The world’s intelligence communities are dominated by both reality and paranoia concerning future potential terrorist actions. Günther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman) heads up a secret anti-terrorism unit in Hamburg. His main task […]
Four hapless citizens try to survive a single night of government-sanctioned lawlessness in The Purge: Anarchy. In the near future, the weight of a growing population threatens the stability of the United States and its capacity to provide services to its citizens. In response, its leaders approved an annual 12-hour period of complete mayhem where anything goes, […]
Possessed individuals and their exorcisms resurface every now and then in the horror genre. For many reasons, nothing tops The Exorcist for me. It was so expertly done — even for its time — that it tapped into the primal fear of evil and added simple special effects for a chilling experience that has not been matched […]
The poorest survivors of a global meltdown fight an oppressive class system aboard a perpetual-motion train in Snowpiercer. The year is 2031. With global warming growing worse 17 years ago, the people of Earth conceived a grand plan to restore the world’s climate. They sprayed the atmosphere with a chemical that, instead of solving the […]
Three college friends head off to catch a computer hacker and find themselves forever changed by their incomprehensible fate in The Signal. Nic Eastman (Brenton Thwaites) and Jonah Breck (Beau Knapp) are freshmen computer geeks from MIT. They’ve recently been captivated by the exploits of a new, renowned hacker who broke into MIT’s network. When the hacker, […]
An introverted office worker, stuck in a mundane life, meets his twin but quickly learns they’re nothing alike in The Double. There must have been something in the water in Hollywood a while back. In the past year, we’ve seen the release of at least three major doppelganger-based films. Earlier this year, we had Ed Harris […]
A homeless loner turns to vigilante revenge when his parents’ killer gets an early release from prison in Blue Ruin. There’s something not quite right about Dwight Evans (Macon Blair). This is not your typical lost soul of society. He breaks into homes to take baths and enjoy some cable TV before returning to solitary afternoons […]
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 […]