In the quirky, mysterious Last Looks, Charlie Dunnam plays Charlie Waldo, a former LAPD detective whose desire for the truth drove him out of the city and into the isolation of the woods. When his former flame, private investigator Lorena Nascimento (Morena Baccarin), shows up asking for help with a case involving the murdered wife…
John Donne wrote that “no man is an island,” but no one told that to martial artist Scott Adkins, who miraculously dodges bullets and fights hand-to-hand with ease. His audience knows what Adkins is capable of based on his work in Ninja, The Expendables 2, and a host of action-heavy films. But, in One Shot,…
In Zeros and Ones, a movie about a terrorist plot that the audience never quite catches up to, Ethan Hawke plays JJ, a soldier trying to stop said plot, and Justin, JJ’s twin brother who seems to be behind the plot. But in Abel Ferrara’s film, which he wrote and directed, the mood is more…
Ellie Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) longs to be a fashion sensation, leaving the rural (Redruth, Cornwall) for London, enrolling in the London College of Fashion. Failing to fit in, Turner flounders, but she finds a real-world friendship with John (Michael Ajao), and a weird time-traveling/psychological flashback to a Swinging Sixties singer, Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). But in…
Clifford the Big Red Dog has never been my favorite children’s book, and I vaguely remember watching some animated episodes with my son as he progressed from the intolerable Barney to the more likable children’s programs like The Smurfs. The in-between spot found him watching this giant puppy rampaging through the streets of his small…
In Netflix’s The Unforgivable, Sandra Bullock plays Ruth Slater, who went to prison for twenty years for murder and now slowly works to rebuild her life. Using Sally Wainwright’s British series Unforgiven as a road map, director Nora Fingscheidt sets the audience up for a series of shocking, emotional twists and turns, all while asking…
The Erwin Brothers have delivered the real life stories Woodlawn, I Can Only Imagine, and I Still Believe, with American Underdog about to debut with the story of Kurt Warner’s unlikely rise from grocery store stocker to NFL MVP. But during the pandemic, they recorded interviews with leading Contemporary Christian Music artists to detail the…
Warner Bros. has thought of everything, aimed at enticing the lovers of all things J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson into the purchase to end all purchases, the Middle-Earth Ultimate Collector’s Edition of the films that brought The Lord of the Rings saga into the twenty-first century and made its characters household names even among those…
S.E. Hinton’s seminal work, made into a motion picture by Francis Ford Coppola, wasn’t considered complete by purists. Now, the story of two 1960s Oklahoma gangs, the East side’s poor Greasers and the West-side rich kid Socs, gets a more elaborate release with thirty-three extra minutes of material. Launching a series of “Brat Pack” films…
Forty years after David Carradine’s Kung Fu debuted, Kung Fu (2021) showed a different twist on the old story: Nicky Shen (Olivia Liang) learns at the Shaolin Monastery in the Yunnan Province of China, after she runs away from the arranged marriage her mother attempts to force her into as a student studying abroad. When…
