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 […]
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 […]