Based on the poster for Acceleration, one would be forgiven for presuming the film is akin to the street racing thrillers that were inescapable after The Fast And The Furious became a bonafide smash. Most of those titles were god-awful,…
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The Big Picture Four-time Emmy winner Dan Levy makes his feature writing and directorial debut with Good Grief, a film about a man grappling with the loss of his husband and uncovering secrets in his marriage. The film focuses on…
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Remember Max Payne? It’s the frenetic action videogame franchise that inevitably thrust Mr. Payne inside a nondescript warehouse in a banana republic where he singlehandedly wastes a small army of narco-terrorists. This is the vibe one gets with director Renny Harlin’s…
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With Concrete Utopia, director Eom Tae-hwa has found himself a victim of ambition. The film has many narrative threads, all interweaving, all highly symbolic. But while the screenplay by Tae-hwa and Lee Shin-ji is engaging and the acting is excellent, the…
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When Jaws came out almost 50 years ago, people were terrified to go back into the water. Not just the beach, but pools as well. A shark in the pool might sound impractical, but that speaks to the dread that…
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Co-writer/director James Fox is back with a feature-length film after a decade hiatus. He teams up with first-time screenwriter Amy Kay DuBoff on Crypto Shadows. The thriller’s mostly a one-person show, with star Mikayla Iverson being the only person on…
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Summary Night Swim is a horror film that focuses more on family drama than actual scares, which may disappoint horror fans. The film utilizes horror elements to explore the characters' insecurities, but lacks imagination and fails to deliver intense scares.…
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In case it wasn’t painfully obvious, the majority of revenge thrillers in existence tend to stick to a crystal clear formula made even easier to follow by modern classics like “John Wick,” “Taken,” and “Oldboy“; a tragic event upends the…
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A Little Glass of Rum has lofty ambitions. While thoughtfully framed, shot, and paced, director Carah Chafin’s true endeavor lies in the interaction and dialogue between characters. As such, the short film format is a perfect cinematic roundtable. And indeed, the…
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PALM SPRINGS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 REVIEW! I could easily see people not liking Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro. It pays homage to cinema of the 50s, 60s, and 70s and boasts a sweeping orchestral score of Bernstein’s best…
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The Big Picture Michelle Yeoh elevates Netflix's The Brothers Sun with her compelling on-screen presence, even in a series that struggles to find its tone. The series starts as a lighthearted action-comedy but takes shaky dramatic steps as it progresses.…
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Taking a page from the mid-budget indie action movies of the ’90s, James Couche’s thriller Lost Phoenix transports the genre of the drug-fueled era of the ’90s to the political and racial tumult of 2020. Our tale opens in the…
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