Jiu Jitsu capitalizes on some playful camerawork and Nicolas Cage’s idiosyncratic presence to transcend its DTV trappings. Only in the realm of DTV could something so perfectly silly as Jiu Jitsu exist, and comfortably at that. A wily mash-up of Power Rangers, Predator, and Mortal…
Fatman is remains a bleak bit of dark holiday fun even as it fails to seize on its more potent genre possibilities. Somebody deserves proper credit for casting scruffy Mel Gibson, replete with his old, crusty madman look, as a disheveled, disillusioned Santa Claus in…
With On the Rocks, Sofia Coppola reconfigures her pet themes into a welcomingly settled film that plays a lot like an NYC-set Somewhere. “It must be very nice to be you.” That’s what Laura (Rashida Jones) says to her gadfly dad Felix (Bill Murray)…
Ben Wheatley’s Rebecca remake is an emotionally facile film devoid of either atmosphere or ambiguity. It’s easy to criticize any literary adaptation simply for straying from the text. Fealty to source material means a lot for fans of any book and it’s frequently the benchmark…
Honest Thief is a lazy, cheap, and deeply stupid entry in the Liam Neeson crime cinema oeuvre. With Honest Thief we have yet another entry in the thriving low-energy, low-effort Liam Neeson concern. In this instance, we meet Tom Carter, demolitions expert and retired Marine,…
With direct-to-video/streaming action films now a bonafide cottage industry with their own tropes, star filmmakers and performers, and aesthetic trappings, the real mediocrities are becoming more and more prominent and are seemingly attracting a classier pedigree of talent. Hence, The Doorman. It stars Australian…
The prospect of spending a couple hours with one of the most tremendously unpleasant movie characters you’re likely to ever encounter might not even be the first reason to check out of Viggo Mortensen’s Falling, but it’s certainly the most apparent. This clearly personal…
Antebellum is a vapid, one-gimmick flick that plays like a politically impotent episode of Black Mirror. There’s still plenty of debate over cinematic depictions of slavery specifically and the abuse of Black bodies in general. Movies like Django Unchained, 12 Years a Slave, and Detroit, to name just a…
Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good home for Asian action films of all stripes and budgets, but rarely are two films so perfectly contrasted against each other in terms…
Mulan fails as action spectacle and lazily cribs from the vast cinematic legacy it so loosely approximates. After such massive financial successes as Beauty and the Beast and especially last year’s The Lion King, it was of course highly unlikely that Disney would stop mining their…
