Post-grad student Lucy is on her way home to introduce her boyfriend to her grandmother while on a break. As they head for the train, they realize that it’s unusually quiet – then in the empty subway station, the silence is broken by a man on fire.
Welcome back to Bushwick, Lucy!
Talk about an awkward teen romance!
Gardner Eliot is the first true Martian – born there in 2018 – and the first true Martian orphan (his mother died in childbirth). When he meets Tulsa, another orphan, via the Internet (by 2034 we have instantaneous internet connections between Earth and Mars!), he falls in love.
Continue reading The Space Between Us Doesn’t Exactly Soar But It Gets There!
The Edge of Seventeen is not just another teen coming-of-age movie. Like John Hughes’ Pretty in Pink or The Breakfast Club, it’s a generational story that is very specific to the present but will likely be considered timeless like Hughes’ films.
Continue reading The Edge of Seventeen – Specific and Timeless!
The Edge of Seventeen is for those of us who break into great gouts of galloping, gasping, full-throated laughter when anyone says anything as crass as ‘they’re the best years of your life’ in regard to high school.
Morning, and the NPR announcer is filling in the details of the day ahead – new outbreaks of something called the Necroambulist Virus are down 30%. A young girl is stopped by police for missing curfew. Later we see a man, Wade Vogel, driving an old truck into town and visiting a quarantine area.
We learn he’s spent the last two weeks looking for his daughter, Maggie, and has been told she’s there. With its eerie score and slightly slower than deliberate pacing, this movie doesn’t seem to fit its star – Vogel is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger – but this is not an Ah-nuld movie by any stretch of the imagination.
Continue reading Maggie – Tender-Hearted, Creepy Undead Movie!
Horns is based on the novel by Joe Hill. It stars Daniel Radcliffe as Ig Perrish, broken-hearted young man who is believed by everyone in town to have raped and murdered his girlfriend, Merrin Williams. Things get weird when he awakens after a night of serious drinking with horns beginning to grow out of his forehead.
Written by Keith Bunin (In Treatment) and directed by Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes), Horns is a deeply disturbed, bleakly funny and frequently scary little film that gives Radcliffe another quality role.
Continue reading Horns: Joe Hill’s Book Makes a Good, Creepy Movie!
With Pierce Brosnan returning to espionage in this moderately budgeted thriller, you can expect great performances from the cast; mayhem controlled and uncontrolled; a damsel in distress who is more than she seems to be, and, of course, monumental betrayal – not necessarily in that order.
Continue reading The November Man Gives Familiar Tropes An Edgy Spin!
It’s a story we’ve seen many times before: curmudgeon (of not the lovable variety) succeeds in business while keeping himself in self-exile through a cloak of bitterness until a kid or a woman (sometimes both, as in this case) come into his life, break down his walls and reveal the wonderful person underneath. Usually, the result is a ham-fisted, overdone movie that is either mind-numbingly boring, or offensive in its sheer inoffensiveness. And So It Goes is a happy exception.
Continue reading Another Day, Another Curmudgeon Becomes Lovable – And So It Goes!
The premise of That Awkward Moment is that that moment when a relationship could go either way is can usually be pinpointed. As Zac Efron’s character Jason puts it, when a girl “begins a conversation with ‘So…’ Writer/director Tom Gormican takes this idea of awkward moments and tries to makes create a hybrid romantic dramedy/buddy movie out of it.
Continue reading That Awkward Moment Is A Series of Awkward Moments!
You know the saying ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’? Out of the Furnace may just be the most implacable movie take on that that I’ve ever seen.
Jason Statham has become the king of the mid-range budget action flicks. He’s a better actor than Arnold and a better fighter than Sly (or, at least, capable of executing more complex choreography). With every movie, he shows a few more colors as his range continues to expand – a nastier edge here; a bit more vulnerability there. Homefront gives Statham fans the action they’ve come to expect and a slightly more complex story than usual.
Continue reading Homefront: Darker Than The Usual Jason Statham Movie!