'Sepa: Nuestro Señor De Los Milagros' (1986) Movie Review

A long-lost documentary about an isolated Peruvian penal colony directed by a long-time collaborator of Werner Herzog? You had me at hello, Sepa: Nuestro Senor de los Milagros (Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles). And the newly restored film does not disappoint.

'Avengement' (2019) Movie Review

To give you an idea of the level of brutality in Avengement, the latest team-up from star Scott Adkins and director Jesse V. Johnson, at one point Adkins’ character, Cain Burgess, straight up bites out a dude’s jugular with a ferocious snarl. And no, this isn’t a vampire movie. This is a gritty, mean, down and dirty crime story about gritty, mean, down and dirty criminals. It’s also Johnson’s most ambitious film to date, as well as maybe his best.

Check Out The U.K. Trailer For Grim Muay Thai Prison Drama 'A Prayer Before Dawn'

A24’s A Prayer Before Dawn has been one of my most-anticipated movies since I heard it was happening. It has Muay Thai, tells an insane true-life story, and was partially filmed in notorious Thai prisons using real prisoners. All that sets my movie spider sense a-tingling. And a new U.K. trailer has me marking off days on my calendar and contemplating buying a plane ticket.

'A Prayer Before Dawn' Trailer: Prison, Drugs, And Muay Thai

A real-life story of drug addiction, prison, and Muay Thai. You bet your ass I’ve been tracking A Prayer Before Dawn since I first heard about it. There hasn’t been a ton to follow—it debuted at Cannes back in May, but even though it garnered positive reviews, it didn’t make a huge splash. But A24—not necessarily the company I expected to drop a Muay Thai prison movie in my lap—rectified that with this new trailer and it looks like everything I hoped it would be.

'King of Devil's Island' Movie Review

A few minutes into Norwegian director Marius Holst’s “King of Devil’s Island” you can guess the direction the story will go. That isn’t to say the film is bad or boring, it is in fact quite the opposite, but the plot is certainly one you’ve seen numerous times before. Part prison tale, part story of rebellion against a corrupt system, “King of Devil’s Island” follows the time-honored, almost western arc of a new individual coming into an existing situation and indelibly altering the landscape. What keeps the film from becoming stale are the performances, especially by the young cast, and the bonds and emotions they bring to the piece.

'Stone' Movie Review

With a cast that includes names like Robert De Niro, Edward Norton, and Milla Jovovich, it would be natural for you to expect a certain level of quality from a film (okay, maybe Milla Jovovich doesn’t automatically equal lofty expectations). But “Stone”, in which these three actors form the core, underperforms at every turn. It’s a little bit like watching the Seattle Mariners this past season. On paper they looked poised to make cause a ruckus and challenge for their division crown, but during the year every player on the roster had career lows, seeming statistical anomalies. “Stone” has pretentions towards being a film of great import, but watching it, you understand why it was never in more than 125 theaters at a single time. It simply isn’t very good.

'The Fighter' Movie Review

“The Fighter” is a story of comebacks, in life, love, family, and boxing. Directed by David O. Russell, this what he does best, creating a world full of real, flawed people in a tough situation, and everything that goes along with that. Moments of laughter and levity mix with cruelly painful realizations. Uplifting triumphs are juxtaposed with crushing defeats. At times it can be kind of a mess, where you’re not entirely sure what the real story is, but the strength of the acting carries you through the rough patches.

'Faster' Review

While there are parts of “Faster” that are wonderful, there is so much unfulfilled potential that the film ultimately fails to deliver. The set up is so promising—a convict known only as Driver (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, again proving himself to be a competent movie badass) gets out of prison after ten years, accompanied by one of the best theme songs of all time, “Good-bye My Friend” by Guido and Maurizio De Angeles (the song is the main theme from “Street Law”, a 70s Italian crime starring Franco Nero). He picks up a sweet muscle car, a big gun with big bullets, and a list of names of people to kill. Immediately, he walks into a building and blasts a hole in the head of that ginger guy who played a Crip in “Colors” (Courtney Gaines). Billy Bob Thornton is the grizzled, beaten down, ten-days-from-retirement cop who, along with Carla Gugino, tries to track down and stop Driver.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

I finally got around to seeing “Resident Evil: Afterlife” the other day, but to be quite honest, it’s taken me a while to write about it because I kind of forgot about it. It wasn’t very good. Not that the other installments in the series were mind-blowing or anything, but this new chapter is the weakest, even though it is by far the most popular and most three-dimensional to date. The whole thing is pretty forgettable.

Damage

I’m a sucker for movies starring professional wrestlers. I have been since Hulk Hogan popped up in “Rocky III”. “No Holds Barred” and “They Live” only solidified it a few years later. I don’t claim that they’re all good, but, especially in recent days, they tend to be of a genre that I enjoy, chiefly low budget action that is driven by one central badass. They’re throwbacks to the 80s when it was assumed that the toughest guy in the room was automatically the biggest. Guys like Stallone or Schwarzenegger would have played these parts back in the day.

Dante 01

After watching Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s newest film, “Micmacs”, I started to wonder what has become of Marc Caro. It was an easy question to answer; I simply hadn’t taken the time to ask it before. In 2008, he made his debut as a solo director with the science fiction film, “Dante 01”. To call it just a sci-fi movie does “Dante 01” a disservice. Not only does it inhabit the sci-fi realm, but it crosses neatly over into psychological horror, and rounds itself out as a prison movie, complete with a brutal shanking.

Orbiting high above the molten planet Dante, is the prison space station Dante 01. More than a simple prison, it is a psychiatric hospital for a handful the most violent offenders deep space has to offer. These prisoners are volunteers, they all would have been executed otherwise, and they participate in a range of psychiatric experiments, testing new procedures and protocols.

A Prophet (Un prophète)

Jacques Audiard’s 2009 prison crime drama “A Prophet” (“Un prophète”) was nominated for and won an absurd amount of awards, including the prizes at Cannes, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, and the Cèsar Awards, among numerous others, and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. It was tapped for awards across the board, from acting and directing, to writing and cinematography.

Normally that amount of glowing praise raises some red flags for me since my tastes and opinions run somewhat askew to that of the critical mainstream. (I still think of Steven Seagal as a viable film star, that’s where I’m coming from.) However, in this case the admiration and worship are warranted. Not to sound like a jackass who thinks his opinion is important, but “A Prophet” is easily one of the best movies of 2009.