This intimate drama about a woman who put her aspirations on hold when her husband goes to prison earned awards at Sundance and the Independent Spirit Awards.
Tag: Lionsgate
‘Haywire’ – bad-ass action on HBO Max
Haywire (2011) is Steven Soderbergh’s drive-in assassin action movie by way of a sleek art-house conspiracy thriller. According to the director, the film sprung from his desire to develop a film around the talents and skill of mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, and the finished film — which casts Carano as a covert agent […]
Paul Schrader’s ‘First Reformed’ on Showtime Anytime and Kanopy
Anyone who has followed the career of Paul Schrader could fall into the trap of simply cataloguing the ways in which First Reformed (2018) is a summation of his themes and inspirations. Imagine the promotional possibilities: “From the author of “Transcendental Cinema” and “Notes on Film Noir” and the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and The Last […]
The original ‘The Wicker Man’ on Amazon Prime
The original The Wicker Man (1973) begins as a murder mystery and turns into something else entirely. Edward Woodward stars as the stiff English police detective who is sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl and discovers a culture living a happy “heathen” lifestyle, lorded over (literally) by […]
‘It Comes at Night’ on Netflix and free on Kanopy
The title of It Comes at Night (2017) sets certain expectations. What exactly comes at night? But the survival thriller from writer/director Trey Edward Shults, set sometime after the ravages of an unnamed and unexplained plague have ripped through the cities and sent survivors into the isolation of the wilderness, isn’t about monsters (human or […]
TVD: ‘Westworld’ reborn, ‘American Gods’ debuts, the beginning of the end of ‘Game of Thrones’
Westworld: Season One – The Maze (HBO, Blu-ray, DVD) Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld was a clever science fiction thriller about a theme park that provided interactive adventures with robotic hosts. The 2016 series developed and produced for HBO by Jonathan Nolan (Person of Interest) and his creative partner and wife Lisa Joy uses the […]