Solitary Man

In movies there is often a certain romance associated with people who live every day like it may be their last, who live like there is no tomorrow. Film celebrates those people who just say fuck it, seize the day, and go after what they want with reckless abandon. The dark comedy “Solitary Man” ventures show the other side of that. It shows the loneliness, the broken relationships, the burned bridges, and the pain left behind.

Salt

Wait a minute. The bad guys in “Salt” are Cold War era Russians? Really? I kind of like that. I kind of like that a lot. They’re throwback villains that take me back to the movies of my youth where the Russians were like the default setting for cinematic evildoers. It’s an interesting choice for an action film in 2010, but I’m behind it.

A Dangerous Man

Steven Seagal has made some of my favorite movies of all time, like “Out for Justice”, “Hard to Kill”, “Above the Law”, “Under Siege”. He’s also made some unwatchable garbage, but that’s beside the point. His fight with Dan Inosanto in “Out for Justice” is on my short list of best fights ever.

Piranha 3D

Holy fucking shit. Let me say that again, slower this time. Holy. Fucking. Shit. “Piranha 3D” is my new favorite movie of 2010.

The Horseman

You can tell “The Horseman” is going to be grim from the very first frame, when you see a teenage girl crying in an alley. Images like that don’t generally indicate that happy fun times lie ahead. What is coming is a rugged, badass tale of revenge.

City Island

Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia) is a corrections officer with secrets. The first one is that his lifelong dream is to become an actor. This ambition embarrasses him so much so that he lies to Joyce (Juliana Margulies), his wife, about taking an acting class in the evenings. On these nights he says he has a poker game. In Vince’s world gambling is more appropriate than acting. He has a normal life. He still lives in the house he grew up in on City Island, a small island off of the Bronx, with Joyce and their son, Vince Jr. (Ezra Miller), and has a daughter, Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Garcia’s real-life daughter), in college in the city. Frivolous dreams, like acting, have no place in his life.

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.