It is rare when a Hollywood thriller can glue us to our seats. These days, big budget films in this genre are too concerned with creating big action set-pieces meant to be eye candy, rather than crafting smart and interesting situations where the tension comes out of the moment and the characters. Therefore, the best thrillers usually come from the independent or the foreign film worlds. German filmmaker Patrick Vollrath’s
In 2005 writer-director Rian Johnson made a memorable film called “Brick” which combined the private eye-crime noir genre with a high-school setting and made us start to wonder if Joseph Gordon Levitt was going to have a career past being the alien teenager on “3rd Rock from the Sun.” Now no one is wondering anymore as Levitt teams up again with the director for “Looper,” the year’s most ingenious and thought-provoking
If you hear the movie press machine tell it, I’m supposed to come away from 50/50 talking about how it’s a new type of cancer movie: frank, funny, and unconventionally moving and based on the real-life cancer experiences of its screenwriter, Will Reiser. Instead, I left with a cool feeling toward the film’s misogyny, something that Seth Rogen’s presence often serves as a dog whistle for. Whether intentional or not, 50/50 turns