The siege in fact began months before the movie came out, with pre-emptive protests from the Arab-American community. The storyline of a series of Arab terrorist attacks resulting in the imposition of martial law in Brooklyn — though not until perhaps an hour and a quarter into the hour-and-three-quarters running …
Buzzed-up remake of the 1974 hijacked-subway thriller, a handy yardstick of early-21st-century style: photographic gimmicks (pixillation, slow-motion, blurs, zooms, whatnot), throwaway car crashes, outlandish one-man heroics from the deskbound train dispatcher, inflationism in theme and plot as well as in ransom demand. It took some smarts to retrieve from the …
A standing joke/disclaimer: I probably would have liked Shakespeare more had his plays been written by someone else. If the film’s the thing, my appreciation of his work doesn’t extend beyond the films of Welles and Kurosawa. To hold Joel Coen to those unattainable standards would be unfair. So it’s …
A slicker, mainstreamier Bad Lieutenant, tagging along on an interminable work shift with a crooked L.A. narc. Even if you are prepared to believe the worst of the police (even if, perchance, you were a member of the O. J. Simpson jury), it's a stretch to believe that any cop …
Rumbling, rattling action film revolving around an unmanned runaway freight train hurtling toward Scranton, PA, with a cargo of hazardous chemicals, and around the two lowly railway employees (Denzel Washington, Chris Pine) who go against explicit orders in a valiant attempt to avert disaster: “We’re gonna run this bitch down!” …
A virtual-reality mass murderer escapes into the real world in the body of an android, more precisely a "nano-tech synthetic organism." ("The only way to stop him is to bust up his software module.") Rudimentary shoot-'em-up, insufficiently and rather irritatingly camouflaged in computer jargon and graphics. With Denzel Washington, Kelly …