When I ran across Crimewave at the Buttons video store at N.W. 63rd and May Avenue in 1988, I had never heard of it. However, I rented it as soon as I spotted that it was co-written by Joel and Ethan Coen; at the time, they had just made this little comedy I absolutely adored, […]
blu-ray
Posted inArts & Culture
Gimme the Loot
Equally affable as they are gruff, Sophie and Malcolm hustle the streets by day. By night, they’re a relentless tag-teaming duo. Literally, they tag the streets of New York, leaving their mark as would-be graffiti masterminds. When some Mets fans start spray-painting over their turf, Sophie and Malcolm come up with the idea to break […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Tower
Set on Christmas Eve (thereby also making it akin to Die Hard), the film takes place at Tower Sky, a twin-towered luxury apartment building of some 1,700 units and 108 floors. The towers connect via a shivers-inducing “sky bridge” with see-through floor. If that makes your stomach do flip-flops, perhaps it can be settled with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
Its joke is that Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell, Hope Springs) and Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi, TV’s Boardwalk Empire) are improbably coiffed stage magicians in Vegas à la Siegfried & Roy, but without the tigers. As glitzy and showy as they are painfully unhip, the two friends have been working together for 30 years, but a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
23:59
In the opening scene of writer/director Gilbert Chan’s film, we also learn that if someone dies at that time, one minute until midnight, his or her soul will not rest in peace. Tan (newcomer Tedd Chan) tells his fellow recruits this while regaling them with ghost stories on the floor of their barracks. They’re in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Come Out and Play
Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Lola Versus) and the very pregnant Beth (the genetically blessed Vinessa Shaw, Side Effects) rent a boat to explore the nearby island of Punta Hueca (can’t-be-accidental translation: Hollow Point). Under a sweltering sun, they find a few kids at the dock and seemingly no else along the village’s roads or in its […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jack the Giant Slayer
The film’s fatal mistake? Perhaps it was director Bryan Singer embracing the 19th-century nature of the story as tightly as he did Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie for his own Superman Returns. These days, to satisfy family audiences, it’s evidently not enough to revive an old-fashioned tale; you have to hip it up with nods […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Anatomy / Anatomy 2
As Paula quickly discovers through her studies, there exists a crazy, frat-like organization on campus whose members like to perform autopsies. What’s so crazy about that? The surgeons of this secret society like to perform said autopsies on live humans. Naturally, that results in danger for her and creepy imagery for us. Slick, sick and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
6 Souls
See, he’s not your everyday schizophrenic, but a supernatural one, playing host to a half-dozen souls (hence the title) sharing one common thread: They were murdered. It’s an intriguing idea, and for a while, co-directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein (Underworld: Awakening) do it justice. Alas, it cannot last. Once the story moves into the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Tower Block
The title refers to an apartment complex built post-WWII, a title card informs us. Once attractive and affordable, the place deteriorated over the decades into England’s equivalent of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green, to the point of demolition. As the thriller opens, only the top floor of Serenity House, aka Tower Block 31, awaits removal and rehousing. […]