Fantasia 2021: 'Sweetie, You Won't Believe It' Movie Review

Three friends, a van full of inflatable sex dolls, and a fishing trip gone very, very wrong. What about a quartet of inept killers and a mysterious one-eyed man with a brutal vendetta? All wrapped in a bloody, violent, patently ridiculous, near-slapstick package? If that sounds like a fine time, add Yernar Nurgaliyev’s Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It to your mist-see list. 

'Why Don't You Just Die!' (2019) Movie Review

Mean, nasty, bloody, violent, funny, vicious, unexpected, twisted, vengeful…I don’t know, I’m trying to collect words that will make you want to watch the crazy new Russian action film Why Don’t You Just Die!. That’s my goal here, to get you to watch this damn movie.

Park Chan-Wook To Direct Violent Western 'The Brigands Of Rattlecreek' For Amazon, Matthew McConaughey Wanted To Star

Park Chan-wook helming an ultraviolent western? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! And this is apparently a thing that’s happening. Praise be! The Oldboy and The Handmaiden director will reportedly lead The Brigands of Rattlecreek for Amazon, working from a script by Brawl in Cell Block 99’s S. Craig Zahler, with an eye on Matthew McConaughey to star.

'Headshot' (2016) Movie Review

If movies have taught me nothing—and let’s be fair, movies have taught me most things—it’s that you never, never, ever mess with an amnesiac. Every last one is a secret badass ready to take you apart by muscle memory alone. And that’s certainly the case in Headshot. The set up is strictly Bourne, but the Indonesian directing duo, the Mo Brothers—Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto, who also wrote the script—deliver bonkers action on a level we don’t often encounter.

'Kick-Ass 2' Movie Review

 

It’s weird, as I walked out of the theater, I was aware that there are big problems with “Kick-Ass 2,” but on the whole, I had been reasonably entertained over the previous 103 minutes. With some movies, distance smooths over the rough patches, and the more you think about them, the more you examine them, the more you enjoy them. “Kick-Ass 2,” however, is not one of those movies. There was a long bus ride home after the screening, and the more I thought about it, the more I broke the film down in my mind, the more glaring, and troubling, the flaws became.

'Tyrannosaur' Movie Review

Paddy Considine is known primarily as a character actor, with some small parts in some big movies, like “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Cinderella Man”, some bigger parts in smaller films. He also has a few writing credits to his name, most notably 2004’s “Dead Man’s Shoes”, which he also starred in. This year he added to his resume, making his feature film directorial debut with the bleak, violent drama, “Tyrannosaur”.

MIFFF Review: 'Boy Wonder'

Do yourself a favor, go out and find a way to watch “Boy Wonder”. It’ll be totally worth it, promise. A near perfect combination of grim revenge movie and dark super hero origin story, it is good enough to make you completely forgive a questionable choice of title. To lump it in with the likes of “Kick-Ass”, “Defendor”, and “Super”, may be a natural inclination, but at the same time it does the film a great disservice because it is markedly different from all of those films. “Boy Wonder” doesn’t aspire to be the first chapter in an ongoing saga, it doesn’t directly reference comic book lore and culture, and the main character doesn’t try to become an iconic superhero or mimic heroic acts from the funny books. He wants revenge, plain, simple, brutal revenge, and this is the grim, gritty, ultraviolent story of how he goes about his quest.

DVD Review: 'Spartacus: Gods of the Arena'

It feels strange to write a review of “Spartacus: Gods of the Arena” right now, just a short few days after the untimely passing of actor Andy Whitfield, who played the titular gladiator in “Spartacus: Blood and Sand”, the series that preceded “Gods of the Arena”. Despite the absence of Spartacus, and Whitfield, in “Gods of the Arena”, he looms in the background, largely because if not for Whitfield’s well-publicized battle with non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, the six-episode mini-series likely wouldn’t have happened. When Whitfield was originally diagnosed he stepped down from the show, a huge hit for the Starz network. While producers of the show frantically searched for a new leading man, eventually selecting Liam McIntyre, the idea for “Gods of the Arena” first came about. It will be curious how the series carries on without Whitfield. The more I watched “Blood and Sand”, the more he carried the bulk of the workload, and he will be missed.

'The Last Circus' Movie Review

Okay boys and girls, it’s time to put on our bat-shit-crazy-pants and get a little bit nuts. And by a little bit nuts, I mean a lot bit nuts. This is really the only way to prepare you for the onslaught of Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia’s (“Accion Mutante”, “800 Bullets”) latest film, “The Last Circus” (“Balada triste de Trompeta”). It is one of the most bizarre and wonderful movies I’ve seen in a long, long time. Any movie that starts with a clown wielding a machete is on the right track. Circus performers conscripted against their will to fight a war they neither believe in, nor have any interest in participating in. How can you go wrong?