REVIEW: Materna [2021]

You don’t get to decide. Four women connected by an incident on the New York City subway … that’s the pitch courtesy of the synopsis for David Gutnik‘s Materna. Rather than make this “psychological portrait” of their reaction to said experience, however, he and co-writers Assol Abdullina and Jade Eshete flip things upside down to express the emotional struggles these women face en route to that fateful convergence. How have their choices led them to that train car and how will they shape their actions once the powder-keg that is…

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REVIEW: Werewolves Within [2021]

Everyone here is a little … questionable. If not for the Ubisoft logo revealing the game company as a producer of Werewolves Within, I would be wondering what the point of buying licensing rights was since this adaptation isn’t even set in medieval times. I’m not sure if there’s more that sets it apart from other variations on Mafia (the deduction party game created in 1986 by Dimitry Davidoff before getting a fresh spin as Werewolf by Andrew Plotkin in 1997 and more recently appropriated into the online sensation Among…

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REVIEW: Captain Phillips [2013]

“A little air might do him some good” Despite my affinity for director Paul Greengrass‘ entries to the Bourne Saga, his cinéma vérité style will always in my opinion be better suited for gritty, true-life tales such as the contemporary classics Bloody Sunday and United 93. (We’ll just forget Green Zone ever squeezed its way into his oeuvre.) As a result, his attachment to Richard Phillips‘ harrowing tale of getting hijacked by Somali pirates and subsequently kidnapped as a hostage for ten million dollars was a perfect marriage from the…

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REVIEW: Men in Black 3 [2012]

“He didn’t say please” While strange for a Men in Black film to open with something other than a crashing spaceship, I’ll admit to being ecstatic for the alternative. Having the sexy Nicole Scherzinger lead us into the maximum-security prison housing one of the universe’s most notorious criminals definitely didn’t hurt either. What I really enjoyed about the pre-credit sequence to Men in Black 3, however, was that our introduction to Bogladite destroyer Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) seemed to get the series back on track as far as giving…

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