The first feature as director for longtime fine actor Vincent D’Onofrio (Kill the Irishman), Woods is as ambling as the five young musicians — one of whom is blind — who drive their van to a forest for a songwriting retreat, where the following things are not allowed: booze, drugs, girls, phones and common sense. That […]
buy
Posted inArts & Culture
A Bag of Hammers
Jason Ritter (The Perfect Family) and co-writer Jake Sandvig (Easy A) star as best buds Ben and Alan, two con men who make money off a valet-parking scheme. But other than that, they’re really nice guys. The axis of their felonious world shifts when they meet a boy who moves into the neighborhood with his […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sector 7
Also reminiscent of everything from James Cameron’s The Abyss to Stephen Sommers’ Deep Rising, but with multiple mentions of feng shui, the Korean sci-fi film takes place on a real-life ocean drilling rig, where work is on hold due to a stuck drill bit. Nevertheless, tough girl Ha Ji-won (Tidal Wave) is determined to find […]
Posted inArts & Culture
D.O.A.
Dennis Quaid stars as English professor Dexter Cornell, who somehow contracts a fatal toxin that glows Re-Animator green and gives him 24 hours to live. Rather than just bang one of his students — well, he does that, too — he sets out to find who’s slipped him one mammoth mickey. And in doing so, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
That’s especially true for Spirit, considering it was directed by the acquired-taste tag team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who gave the world such amped-up, anti-establishment thrillers as Gamer, Crank and its now-immortal Crank: High Voltage. By (thankfully) replacing non-returning director Mark Steven Johnson, Neveldine/Taylor automatically make this follow-up cooler. They get their mitts […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Accident
Masterminded by a lonely, paranoid widowed man who looks like Dwight Schrute and goes by the name of The Brain (Louis Koo, Triple Tap), a group of four carries out hired hits by making them look like accidents, and remarkably, using no weapons. In the opening hit, for instance, a Triad gang boss is felled […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Kill Speed
Flashy, yet trashy, Kill Speed is as generic as its meaningless title implies. It so wants to be another shit-goes-fast blockbuster like The Fast and the Furious, which gets name-checked in a roundabout way, but on a small budget. I believe such a thing is not impossible. One just has to do what writer/director Kim […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Project X
So much potential is built in the first 15 or 20 minutes, in which mild-manner high school loser Thomas (Thomas Mann, It’s Kind of a Funny Story) is goaded into hosting a party while his parents are away. The goal, per obnoxious buddy Costa (newcomer Oliver Cooper), is for the rest of the student body […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
It’s certainly not short on action; Holmes gets into a street brawl, disposes of a bomb and destroys a bachelor party, all before the main plot gets going. That involves what criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris, TV’s Mad Men) may have to do with anarchist activities around town, and what he wants with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Phantom of Crestwood
Some 55 years before Dino De Laurentiis failed to lure audiences into theaters with the promise of a seven-digit payday for one lucky viewer of the wretched Million Dollar Mystery, RKO and super producers David O. Selznick and Merian C. Cooper launched a different kind of contest. Leading up to Crestwood’s premiere, the story was […]