REVIEW: Hardcore Henry [2016]

“Don’t touch that. Emma-Jean is mine.” It’s not that it hasn’t been done beforeā€”it’s just never been done like this. Writer/director Ilya Naishuller rigged GoPro cameras to his cameraman/lead stuntman’s face and let the action fly because who needs trickery when you can literally jump into the fight? Hardcore Henry is a pedal-to-the-metal adrenaline rush adventure taken on by a half-man, half-robot mute resurrected from the dead to move hell and high water so his past life’s wife (Haley Bennett‘s Estelle) is kept safe from the financial benefactor of her…

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REVIEW: The Jungle Book [1967]

“No one explains anything to Shere Khan” It’s without a shred of nostalgia that I declare Disney’s animated The Jungle Book an entertaining romp. Having never seen it due to its absence from my stable of “classics” growing up, my affinity to the characters hailed from “TaleSpin” instead. So it was fun meeting them in their original formā€”bumbling, kindly creatures looking out for the young man-cub they raised to have empathy for their myriad species while man itself sought to kill similar to villainous tiger Shere Khan (George Sanders). I…

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REVIEW: Possession [1981]

“There is nothing to fear except God. Whatever that means to you.” It’s the early 1980s in West Berlin and graffiti everywhere screams for the wall to be taken down. Mysterious figures linger on the other side not quite hidden from view, watching with binoculars and always seemingly looking directly in our direction. Tensions are high, psychosis runs rampant, and people begin to start disappearing. There’s a palpable sense of paranoia setting in that cannot be combatted except by our personal allowance to embrace an unpredictably chaotic side of ourselves.…

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REVIEW: Eye in the Sky [2016]

“Never tell a soldier he doesn’t know the cost of war” How do you simultaneously become hero and martyr in twenty-first century warfare? You find yourself unwittingly lodged within the kill zone of a high value target that has been confirmed without a shadow of a doubt. Death or injury earns you both labels for your people. To die as collateral damage is to potentially radicalize more and more jihadists who may or may not prove more volatile than the ones murdered in the incident. But when actual terrorists who…

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NoHoIFF16 REVIEW: Admins [2016]

“I think I deal with more idiots” The beautiful thing about office inhabitants’ inability to muster up the initiative to learn one iota of technological troubleshooting so as not to prove beholden to an IT department that loathes them is the sheer fact nothing will ever change. While each subsequent generation has a better grasp on what’s happening around them, they’ll remain behind the curve because they refuse to upgrade their knowledge with the latest electronic devices and sophisticated operating systems by choosing to stand still instead. Holdovers from bygone…

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REVIEW: Our Nixon [2013]

“You felt as if you were in a brilliantly lighted, badly run television show” As someone who wasn’t born during Richard Nixon‘s administration, it is somewhat unfair to just conjure images of Deepthroat a la All the President’s Men or bank robbers like in Point Break. Tricky Dick has become the butt of jokesā€”the only president to ever resign his post and quite possibly the most infamous to have held office. He bugged himself, unwittingly had those personal tapes become his political demise, and walked into the fire under his…

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REVIEW: Good Kill [2015]

“They don’t call it a hellfire for nothing” There are agenda movies that remain impartial to display a right and wrong interpretation of the ordeal on display through natural causes and there are those manipulated into force-feeding a single viewpoint upon the audience devoid of nuance. Andrew Niccol‘s Good Kill is the latter. The very few instances where he presents the alternative argument to his thesisā€”that drone strikes are a necessary evil with collateral damage proving the consequence of a “greater good” scenarioā€”either arrive as though the character exclaiming it…

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NoHoIFF16 REVIEW: Gazelle: The Love Issue [2014]

“There is beauty in everything” New York is full of unique individuals. It’s a haven for them to be able to walk down the street with glances of intrigue rather than disgust. Gazelle is just one “Freak Chic” ambassador, but she is also possibly the most important. This isn’t because her style is best or because she is famous beyond the reach of the underground nightclub scene. No, it’s because she’s fearless in providing a voice for those much of the country would love to marginalize and forget. She leaves…

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