Crime

You’d think that after Portrait of a Lady on Fire, we wouldn’t need romances, or even narrative films, anymore. I mean, Céline Sciamma has kinda been there and conquered that. Be that as it may,…

In case you were not aware, Goodfellas actually doesn’t have good fellas in it. I don’t mean the actors — the actors are great and are on par with every other Martin Scorsese film. What I…

A mob enforcer with a troubled conscience, a crime boss who wants to go legit, and an oilman with a fatalistic code of honor. These are the three main players of Scott Wiper’s The Big…

As they say, truth is often stranger than fiction. No better show demonstrates than the longstanding, recently revived program Unsolved Mysteries. The show covers a variety of cold cases that show just how unexplainable our…

On the first day of October, 2017, tragedy struck in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was the final night of Route 91 Harvest, an outdoor country music festival. An estimated 22,000 people were in attendance. At…

One of my deepest fascinations in film is when artists find a way to blur the line between art and reality. As I’ve said time and time again, meta readings of films are some of…

Clark Duke has made a sizeable living being the dependable comic relief. He was the one who traveled to the fictional eighties alongside John Cusack in Hot Tub Time Machine; he was the nerdy sidekick…

I like to think I’m a fan of most film genres, but there’s something about a taut mystery that is extra exciting. Disappearance at Clifton Hill channels a lot of what makes the genre great, trapping…

After my first experience at Sundance last year, I arrived this year at the festival cognizant of the hyperbolic reactions that come with the environment. (Or, at the very least, I did my best. I’m…

Guy Ritchie has had quite an interesting career. Making a name for himself in the late 90s and early 00s with the critical and financial success of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, movie-goers were…

Here’s the premise: a psychotic hitman goes on an ultra-violent odyssey to avenge his brother’s death. Does this sound intriguing to you? Not really? Well, that’s because I forgot to mention that this hitman is…

As a huge fan of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, I was admittedly nervous about El Camino. Jesse Pinkman’s ending in Breaking Bad was a satisfying conclusion to a beloved character. So, when I…

I watched The Accused many years ago, at a point in my life where I was too young to really know what was going on in the film. I knew it was a movie about…

It’s time for another Nicolas Cage VOD feature! I’m not saying I’d rather watch Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — nor am I at all bitter about it not being out in my…

Whether you’re looking at your Twitter feed, scrolling through an article, or even aimlessly walking by the TV as pundits discuss the day’s news, it’s difficult to escape the notion of toxic masculinity. The term…

I’ve always been a fan of action-thrillers that involve corrupt cops. From Filth and Lakeview Terrace to Training Day and The Departed. The trailer for Point Blank suggests that it will follow the budding bromance…

Mix two directors, young attractive leads, some good performances, nice cinematography, and a made-for-TV vibe, and you get A Violent Separation. While this movie has some things going for it, there was clearly an untapped well…

I have been anticipating Dragged Across Concrete from the moment I became aware of its existence. Every so often, I would peruse the Internet for any announcements of its release date. The earlier reviews from…

Triple Frontier had me feeling a bit nostalgic for a time when the crime thriller reigned over everything else in Hollywood. A few decades ago, when an A-lister was looking for a big-time project, they…

So “Bala” translates to “Bullet” in English. That’s right, Columbia Pictures released a hard-edged, tough as nails crime thriller entitled Miss Bullet. Shoosh, these jokes write themselves, don’t they? Did Roger Corman secretly make this film?…

You might not associate Michael Caine with the crime genre, but he’s actually played quite a few memorable crooks in his 62-year acting career. From a professional thief in The Italian Job, to an avenging…

Witnessing Netflix’s transformation from humble video-rental to gigantic streaming behemoth (bestreamoth?) has been disorienting at best. Whereas the release of a new Netflix original movie was once a momentous occasion, the platform nowadays churns out an…

There’s always a few movies at the end of the year that are hoping for awards but ultimately get swallowed up by the sheer volume of films with similar aspirations. The awards season is often…

After a few noteworthy prestige films that included Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen is back with Widows, a film that is sure to wow all kinds of audiences with its genre flair.…

Usually films filled with dogs skew towards becoming overly sentimental and saccharine, shoving dogs in the face of the viewer simply for a cheap emotional response. Dogman, the latest film from Matteo Garrone, goes in the…

Bullitt, a crime/action movie, was first released fifty years ago today. Starring Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughn, it’s far more intelligent than you might expect, and it has become a cinema classic. The Synopsis Just…

Pierre Morel deserves a lot of credit (and some of the blame) for the current state of action movies. His smash hit thriller Taken made studio executives realize the simplicity that can come with the action movie…

We live in a time where abduction thrillers are popping up once every year. Studios try to repeat the success of 2009’s Taken. There have been many Taken knockoffs such as 2013’s The Call and…

The crime/gangster sub-genre contains in itself an anachronistic library of classically defining workings. Historically, the genre seemed to have generally trickled down in relevance, peeking relatively fast but also plateauing in equal measure. It laid…

Heat (1995), the famous first pairing of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, was so well made, with such high quality on both sides of the camera, that it was too good