Wednesday 19 Jun
 
 

The Last Exorcism Part II

Unlike many moviegoers, 17-year-old farm girl Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell, The Day) has no memory of the events of The Last Exorcism, a found-footage smash of three years prior. The Last Exorcism Part II finds her taking steps to build life anew, beginning in a boarding house for troubled girls, where the deeply devout Nell is exposed to such heretofore corrupting influences as lipstick and rock music and YouTube and cotton candy.
06/19/2013 | Comments 0

The ABCs of Death

Suspense novelist Jeffery Deaver once praised the short-story format, writing that the minimal time investment on the part of the reader allows the writer to get away with endings he or she cannot in the long form. In other words, the writer can be meaner, more devious. He's absolutely right, and the theory applies wholesale to The ABCs of Death, more or less a horror anthology depicting "26 ways to die."
06/19/2013 | Comments 0

Ninja III: The Domination

Don't ask why Ninja III: The Domination begins with a ninja assault on a municipal golf course. Just be grateful it does. You also may wonder why its sex scene employs a can of V8: Don't question it. Just lie back and enjoy it.
06/14/2013 | Comments 0

Lifeforce

Tobe Hooper got a raw deal. The director of horror hits The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist didn't deserve to be sent to movie jail for 1985's Lifeforce. It's a well-crafted, well-intentioned work that was mismarketed and misunderstood, losing a bundle of money and soon sending Hooper into the lands of episodic television and direct-to-video features.
06/14/2013 | Comments 0

Dead Souls

With Dead Souls, we can prove something about the Chiller cable network's original features that Remains could not: Source material is not to blame for their pervasive generic nature — it's the economy, stupid.
06/11/2013 | Comments 0
Home · Articles · Movies · Drama · American Gangster
Drama

American Gangster


None November 3rd, 2007

americangangster

Reviewer's grade: B+

 

Like the drug kingpin at the center of "American Gangster," this crime thriller is tough, exciting and occasionally spellbinding - but what it really craves is respectability. Based on a New York magazine article by Mark Jacobson, it tells the true-life story of Frank Lucas, who rose to underworld prominence in the early Seventies by selling high-grade heroin on the streets of Harlem.

 

Denzel Washington portrays Lucas with the actor's customary smoothness, with Russell Crowe in rumpled mode as the straight-arrow New Jersey prosecutor hot on his trail. Employing documentary-like camerawork and naturalistic lighting, director Ridley Scott beautifully mimics the gritty urban stylistics of the Seventies, hearkening back to the days when New York was a cesspool of sin and corruption.

 

Despite an indulgent running time of 157 minutes, "American Gangster" isn't quite the epic it aspires to be, but it does make for a raw and raucous time at the movies. R

 

-Phil Bacharach    

 

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  • Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
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