The Next Three Days

This well-orchestrated crime caper succeeds NEARLY everywhere. Russell Crowe plays his teacher/family man character nicely, with a realistic degree of uncertainty and fear as he comes to grips with the perilous choices he must make to carry out his plan to spring his murder-accused wife from the ‘pokey’. The initial chemistry between Crowe and Elizabeth […]

Limitless

I didn’t want to like this one going in, but against my initial (and unfair) judgement, this flick is actually quite entertaining. The concept of a pill that unlocks the dormant intelligence locked away in the inner recesses of the mind is a simple one but the execution, particularly the kinetic and fun visuals, is […]

Dagon

One of these days, a worthy adaptation of HP Lovecrafts stories and ‘Old Ones’ mythology will emerge. This 2001 piece of crap is NOT it. It’s really only Dagon in name, as it has FAR more in common, thematically, with the terrific short story ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’. But this ‘telling’ of THAT story sucks. […]

The Abandoned

This low-budget horror film from 2006 revolves around an adopted child who returns to her native Russia as an adult to resolve the estate matters of her late biological family, particularly the remote and creepily run-down property and house. Cue the terror. And I friggin dare ya to watch this one in the dark and […]

Unknown

This mystery/thriller stars Liam Neeson as a doctor visiting Berlin with his wife for a science symposium, who survives a freak car accident to wake up to find that no one seems to know who he is. Parts of this flick reminded me alot of Harrison Fords 1988 film Frantic while others felt torn from […]

House of the Devil

Nice! I love finding gems!. I stumbled across this ‘micro-budget’ horror film from 2009, almost by accident, and I’m glad that I did. Taking inspiration from the myth of the malicious Satanic cult stories of the late 70s/early 80s, the story focuses on a financially hard-pressed female college student who takes on a seemingly benign […]

Source Code

This reasonably clever lil sci-fi thriller wants to have been directed by The Hitch…or maybe to have taken place in The Twilight Zone. It’s a interesting premise done with conviction, especially by Jake Gyllenhaal as the displaced and desperate Army pilot tasked with averting a terrorist incident on a Chicago commuter train. The small budget […]

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

This is a very mature, realistic and deliberately paced espionage story. It is definitely not cut from the same cloth as the Bond or Bourne films. It takes its time with the complexities of the narrative and its look at the international ‘spy game’ of the Cold War in the early 1970s. The cast are […]

Apollo 18

As ‘found footage’ movies go, this one is handled FAIRLY well. The ‘actors’ do a credible job, the NASA props and moonscape sets flow seamlessly into the actual archive footage and the location and situation lends perfectly to the genre. On the down side, there was a point where it was hard to overlook the […]

The Divide

This IS the ‘Feel Good Movie of the Year’! This intense, nihilistic and ugly film from 2011 focuses on a group of survivors who escape the outbreak of WW3 by retreating into the basement of their apartment building as the nukes fall. Once there, it’s a steady decline as they start to lose grip on […]