A confused teen finds himself trapped at the center of a massive maze with no memory of who he is or his life before in The Maze Runner. Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) is jolted awake from a foggy haze, unsure of everything he sees around him. He’s encircled by dozens of grizzled, suspicious boys who forcefully introduce him into […]
A small entourage joins a determined explorer in her latest adventure below the streets of Paris in As Above/So Below. A young Lara Croft-like adventurer, Scarlett (Perdita Weeks), has spent years in search of the elusive Philosopher’s Stone — a chemical substance that can turn lead into gold and bestow eternal life on its owner. […]
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 […]
Artificial intelligence has been a source of fear in the movies ever since some human being imagined a plot in which a smart computer might not like its subservience to humanity. There are many examples of this theme, notably 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and WarGames. Despite all of the modern […]
Two siblings, scarred by strange circumstances that resulted in the death of their parents years earlier, return to the scene of the crime in Oculus. A decade ago, Kaylie Russell (Karen Gillan) and Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) endured the wrath of their increasingly unstable and dangerous parents (Katee Sackhoff and Rory Cochrane). One fateful evening, both […]
People who go to flea markets dream of the day that they buy an innocuous painting for $5 that turns out to be a valuable work of art. You hear these stories every year, and other modern equivalents involve treasures found in the contents of houses in estate sales or in storage lockers as seen […]
An eccentric nanny leaves behind a legacy of priceless photographs and endless questions in Finding Vivian Maier. In April 2009, a very tall, 83-year-old woman quietly passed away. No one really knew all that much about her. Two years earlier, a 26-year-old real estate agent, John Maloof, looking for pictures of a local Chicago neighborhood, […]
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 […]
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 […]
An estranged common thief is captivated by a beautiful, quirky resident of the estate he intended to rob in Winter’s Tale. The parents of Peter Lake (Colin Farrell), hoping for a better life for their infant son, set him afloat in a model boat after being denied entry into the United States in the late […]
An Iranian husband returns to France and his estranged wife to finalize their divorce in The Past. Marie Brisson (Bérénice Bejo) and her husband Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) parted ways a few years back, leaving Marie to raise her two daughters (from a previous marriage) alone. Ahmad returns to France and Marie to check in on […]
If you keep an eye out for viral videos, you probably saw the “devil baby” video that made the rounds this past week. It was a clever and hilarious promotional prank for the new film Devil’s Due. They put an animatronic baby that looks possessed or demonic in a remote-controlled carriage and rolled it around […]