Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024)
Opening Birmingham Alabama’s 26th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival [...]
Thriller
Trap (2024)
I walk into an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a certain set of expectations, not the least of which is that no matter how astonishingly stupid his plot twists turn out to be, the movie will have, at the very least, a certain level of style. He’s a good filmmaker on a technical level. He […]
Agent Game (2022)
As a matter of personal policy, I make it a rule never to drag an actor’s personal issues into their latest work. Yet, I shamefully admit that I found myself involuntarily (and admittedly humorously) wincing during the pre-credit sequence of Agent Game in which Mel Gibson tells his unseen radio cohort: “We may have a problem.” […]
Barbarians (2022)
Two Thousand Twenty-Two marks the 40th anniversary of my favorite horror film, Tobe Hooper’s Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist which, to my mind, is the ultimate in home invasion thrillers. What made it special was that there was something else buried underneath it’s roller-coaster façade – a sense of the new money-mad world being punished for stealing the land […]
The Circle (2017)
The Circle is the kind of movie that operates completely on theory while the audience watches in frustration as it completely omits logic or common sense. Here is a techno-phobic piece of dreck that looks like high-tech thriller wrapped in social commentary, but by the time all of the pieces have been laid out, you […]
Nerve (2016)
Nerve is a safe, tepid treatment of a subject that is so current you’d swear the movie was made only yesterday. It’s about our all-consuming obsession with apps and online games that arrives just at the moment when half of the country is mired in ‘Pokémon Go‘ and the other half wishes they’d just put […]
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
10 Cloverfield Lane is alternately fascinating and frustrating at the same time. It is fascinating in the moment but frustrating in that it takes so long to get where it’s going that it arrives at an ending that should have been the beginning of the second act. That’s doesn’t make the movie bad exactly, it […]
Spectre (2015)
Even with its impressive longevity, the James Bond series has always seemed to be teetering just on the edge of becoming outdated, at least in the years since Sean Connery stepped aside. The culture, the world situation, the political climate, the technological advancements and, of course, the state of cinema itself are always threatening to […]
The Martian (2015)
There can’t be a greater story device then that of basic survival. One character battles against the elements as their life hangs by the slender thread solely dependent on their own ingenuity and wit. That’s the crux of Ridley Scott’s adaptation of The Martian, a bold and exhilarating red-blooded adventure about a man stranded on […]
