For a small, indie thriller about one of today’s most disturbing real issues, A Desert is good. But we’ve already seen the same conflict depicted much more impressively and enjoyably in the fifth episode of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young. The expository build-up before the key twist is better than the…

A desert and a gas station with a weirdo and a confused girl after a car accident. The motif of intersecting time planes is not exactly original, but as always, it is reliably entertaining. And when the film’s pace starts to slow, clever connections are made, as in the films of Moorhead and Benson. At one moment, it…

The Thicket is an enjoyable and gritty western set in a snowy landscape where a perfect Peter Dinklage plays a bounty hunter searching for Thicket Bill, a cold-blooded killer played by Juliette Lewis – both give great performances. Dinklage also has a very uncharacteristic group of sidekicks and you care about each of…

The Age of Adaline ten years on, no longer dealing with the travails of age, but this time with relationship violence, only far less nostalgically old-school. With Blake Lively, a piano, and autumnal Boston, it's a bit of a safe bet in a sense, because those basic building blocks rarely end in fiascos, and neither…

MadS breaks some kind of record in serving up a brilliant (!) exposition and then criminally failing to fulfil expectations. With its inverted dramatic arc, MadS is impressive in its strong technical ambitions of a continuous one-take film, kicked off with an extreme situation promising great development to come, only…

A desert and a gas station with a weirdo and a confused girl after a car accident. The motif of intersecting time planes is not exactly original, but as always, it is reliably entertaining. And when the film’s pace starts to slow, clever connections are made, as in the films of Moorhead and Benson. At one moment, it…

For a small, indie thriller about one of today’s most disturbing real issues, A Desert is good. But we’ve already seen the same conflict depicted much more impressively and enjoyably in the fifth episode of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young. The expository build-up before the key twist is better than the…

A family drama with the formula of a ghostly thriller that focuses on the characters’ complicated relationships rather than on scares. And it comes to a point that is slightly shocking, yet it also cuts dead the potential of the mystery dimension to be something more sophisticated that would take this television…

A Spanish zombie flick with all of the requisite plot ingredients, but with a smaller portion of gore. And there could have also been more conflicts with the zombies. Apocalipsis Z is diverse in its locations, but the movements along the wooded west coast of Spain and on the water are the only things that give the…

Harmless silliness for lovers of retro spy/crime movies ranging from Fantomas to James Bond and the current “laid-back” Guy Ritchie. You’ll even catch a hint of Sin City and that’s not a coincidence – the Diabolik franchise is based on a popular Italian comic book of the same name. A lot of disguises and rubber masks,…