Darkness of Man (2024)

Darkness of Man has delusions of being neo-noir. Accordingly, it is loaded with voice-over narration by the hero, played by Jean-Claude Van Damme. You can easily see, or rather, hear what’s wrong with that. Van Damme's signature accent and delivery do not quite fit the brooding, enigmatic tone required for a neo-noir protagonist, to say the...

Crimes of the Future (2022)

Crimes of the Future is a near-perfect recipe for vintage David Cronenberg. Not a remake of his 1970 movie of the same name, but a revisiting — complete with nods to Dead Ringers, eXistenZ, and The Fly — of recurrent obsessions: body horror (which the protagonists regard as "body art," but then isn’t real-life body...

Ruthless (2023)

Ruthless stars the unlikeliest avenging badass. I don’t think a lot of people were clamoring to see Dermot Mulroney of all people kicking ass and taking names, nor do I think that this movie will make many converts to that particular cause. That said, this little Death Wish wannabe is nothing to be ashamed of...

Stillwater (2021)

If The Pledge and Prisoners had a child and that child moved to France, it would be Stillwater. While it may not reach the same level of intense pacing and gripping tension as those two films, it still delivers a compelling, albeit unfocused, story with strong performances.   The plot may leave some viewers wanting a little coherence....

Wasp Network (2019)

Wasp Network is "based on a true story," but its makers may have been looking at reality through beer goggles. For example, there is a character played by Ana de Armas, whom I would describe as a young Tiffani Amber Thiessen. During the epilogue, a photo of the corresponding real person is shown, and what we...

Uncovered (1994)

What I’ve read of Arturo Pérez-Reverte seems to exist somewhere in between Umberto Eco and Dan Brown (not an entirely bad place to be), and so do the film adaptations of his work that I’ve watched.  Either he’s good at writing screen-translatable novels, or he’s been lucky (which is better than being good) to have...

Asphalt City (2023)

Starring Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan, Michael Pitt, and Myke Tyson, Asphalt City certainly runs the gamut from the tippy top of the acting profession, through the ‘good, not great’ category, and all the way down to ‘what the hell were they thinking?’  Early in his career, Sheridan would overperform when paired with a heavyweight like McConaughey...

The Bricklayer (2023)

If action movies are anything to go by, the CIA (and any facsimile thereof) is like the WWE in the early-to-mid 90s (then WWF) — everybody seems to have a job doing something else (well, not everybody, but you get the idea); if they're not beekeepers, they’re bricklayers.   Incidentally, The Bricklayer was certainly made with...

Life Like (2019)

Dickens is often discussed in Life Like, but the movie takes its literary cues (and quite openly, I think) from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was, of course, turned into Blade Runner) and Pinocchio (by way of A.I. Artificial Intelligence). It would have benefited the script to be more of the former and less...