Love Wolf boasts a bold formal idea that’s wielded to unfortunately perfunctory ends. Jonathan Ogilvie’s Lone Wolf, a political thriller told almost entirely through mock surveillance footage, has an admittedly good hook. The police are surveilling Conrad, the radical owner of an anarchist books and…
Copshop finds Joe Carnahan at the top of his game, with the requisite violence, humor, and plot intricacies to sell this brand of genre bombast. Thanks to pandemic-related delays, we’re being gifted (or threatened with, depending on one’s tolerance for his brand of smart-ass macho bluster)…
The Nowhere Inn smartly softens its meta conceit with some winking humor, but doesn’t interrogate any of its ideas or rise above mere brand management. Returning to the scene of the crime, Annie Clark (who performs as St. Vincent, important distinction here) has reteamed with…
Prisoners of the Ghostland is neither Sono nor Cage’s finest work, but it’s a good enough fix for those in need of either’s madman energy. If there’s any director working today that understands what Nicolas Cage means when he describes his style as “nouveau shamanic,”…
Malignant isn’t a start-to-finish success, but its final 30 minutes solidify it as one of the wildest, weirdest horror films in some time. In interviews and in marketing materials, Malignant is pitched as James Wan’s take on the Giallo, but while the director borrows elements…
TMBMZM oddly tilts toward authenticity rather than camp, to disappointing results. The Manson Brothers Midnight Zombie Massacre is a title that promises a lot. For the record, the titular brothers have nothing to do with notorious serial killer, but are instead a pair of…
Some pacing issues occasionally upset We Need to Do Something‘s otherwise effective tone, but it remains a solid, low-ceiling genre exercise. We Need to Do Something is both the title of the new film by Sean King O’Grady as well as the increasingly frantic…
Wild Indian suggests a possible fascinating study that it doesn’t follow through on, but it does add enough wrinkles and character nuance to remain mostly compelling. Wild Indian begins with an epigraph that reads as parable: “Some time ago…There was an Ojibwe man who got…
The Show is an imperfect beast, but it’s beautiful and horrifying in a way only Alan Moore can concoct. Northampton has always been a strange place. Historically, the town has a habit of being on the losing side of every conflict, and between civil wars,…
The Protégé is sometimes tonally ungainly, but its no-frills, old-school action filmmaking are a breath of fresh air in an increasingly CGI-saturated genre. When she’s rescued as a child from her native Vietnam by the hit-man Moody (Samuel L. Jackson), and then subsequently trained in…
