It Lives Inside
Horror movies have long inserted religious themes. The theology usually involves Christianity, and the faithful are rarely presented in a favorable light. Piper Laurie’s character in Carrie or the Puritan family in The Witch immediately come to mind. It Lives Inside weaves Hinduism into its narrative but from a decidedly positive perspective. Our tale concerns […]
No One Will Save You
A sci-fi, horror, aliens landing, home invasion thriller — writer/director Brian Duffield’s followup to his 2020 video-on-demand release Spontaneous blends many ideas. Ironically, the minimalist approach is what sets the narrative apart. No One Will Save You is an odd but compelling picture. It debuted September 22 on streaming: Hulu in the United States, Star+ […]
Talk to Me
Talk to Me announces you’re in for an unsettling tale with a shocker of a prologue. Any details would ruin the surprise. After a disturbing intro, it introduces our lead protagonist, memorably played by Sophie Wilde. Mia is a 17-year-old struggling with the death of her mother (Alexandria Steffensen). She believes Rhea’s passing was the […]
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
The panic over Artificial Intelligence (AI) has fluctuated in the public consciousness ever since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927. However, the current fixation with the technology has become a ridiculous obsession in the modern zeitgeist. The latest chapter in the Mission Impossible franchise capitalizes on that fear. Covert ops agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) finds […]
Extraction 2
Mercenary Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) is back in action. This time he’s trying to rescue the wife (Tinatin Dalakishvili) of an abusive crime lord (Tornike Bziava) and her two children from a Georgian prison. Operatives Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) and Nik’s brother Yaz (Adam Bessa) return to help Rake infiltrate the cell where the family is […]
Missing
Missing is a popular title for movies, especially ones involving people last seen in South America. Before this flick was released in January 2023, I associated the title with a 1982 movie starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek about the disappearance of an American journalist in Chile. It received four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, […]
The Mother
On the heels of Mother’s Day 2023, Netflix blessed all moms with a gift, a violent R-rated action thriller starring Jennifer Lopez as a beautiful badass. The film immediately shot to #1 and stayed there for ten days. It’s still in the Top 10 as I write this. I wasn’t planning to watch it, but […]
Fast X
Fast X is an outlandish chapter in a series overflowing with ridiculous entries. The template was well-established long ago. Take a beloved group of individuals working for a mysterious government organization known as The Agency. Have them jet off to far-flung areas of the world and participate in various death-defying action stunts against some evil […]
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
Even though The Covenant noticeably includes the filmmaker’s name in the title, this is not a typical Guy Ritchie movie. The designation was ostensibly done to differentiate itself from others with similar titles. The most well-known being a Renny Harlin-directed flick in 2006 about high school boys descended from colonial witches. Ritchie’s latest may be […]
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is as incendiary as it sounds. Originally a 2021 nonfiction book by Swedish author Andreas Malm whose politics on climate change have been described as Marxist. He advocates eco-terrorism; that is, he maintains that economic sabotage is an effective form of environmental activism. It’s a controversial opinion. How to […]