Dangerous is content to ride its plateaued production structure of cribbed parts to the territory of who cares. When speaking of Dangerous, it’s difficult to not make the most immediate Die Hard reference when the film, itself, seems comfortable enough luxuriating in that very pastiche. Like…
Zeros and Ones’ study of violence and digitality is the latest proof that Ferrara thrives in the spaces between knuckleheaded obviousness and total abstraction. A supreme sculptor of the effects of spiritual and physical isolation, Abel Ferrara has made a good number of films…
Warning: Warning is an absolute disaster. An existential slice of sci-fi, Warning is the kind of film that practically begs for a thorough post-mortem. It’s quite obvious that something went horribly wrong after production wrapped, starting with the fact that the onscreen credits list this…
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…
Habit sounds like fun, should be fun, wants to be fun; it’s more like Hell. Bella Thorne plays a Los Angeles party girl who masquerades as a nun to escape violent drug dealers in Habit, a film so monumentally bad that it fucks up the…
Die in a Gunfight isn’t the worst Romeo and Juliet adaptation on record, but it’s certainly not a good one. The last thing the film world needed was an umpteenth retelling of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and yet here we are with Die…
Siberia takes on nothing less than the very nature of reality, and is an emphatic statement on the necessity, not luxury, of creativity. Relating to an interviewer about his moviegoing habits as a child, Abel Ferrara noted that his primary interest was in Westerns, and…
Though technically a worse film than the original, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard rides its low-brow wave to lizard brain delights. 2017’s The Hitman’s Bodyguard proved a bit of a sleeper hit, reconfiguring a Midnight Run-ish classic buddy caper picture as straight-up EuropaCorp-style trash, complete with…
Endangered Species is a lean, mostly successful little thriller that proves director Bassett’s legitimate genre chops. It’s difficult to remember now, but the last decades of the 20th century were a golden age of animal adventure tales, whether geared towards kids (The Bear, Homeward Bound,…
Spiral fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of the Saw franchise, deviating from the series formula to remarkably diminished results. Spiral: From the Book of Saw is but the latest attempt to reboot the infamous Saw franchise, a horror series so popular that it essentially kicked off the entire…