Movies

The history of Mesoamerican culture is bathed in blood. Rituals of human sacrifice were a cornerstone of Aztec faith, buttressing their belief that ravenous gods required victims to allow the sun to rise. With the Spanish conquest such ideas became interwoven within the fabric of Christianity, and to this day in remote areas of Mexico there exists a pervasive folk religion hidden beneath the modern veneer, a spiritual quilt that's part Catholic creed, part ancient native custom and part superstition. Even the notorious drug cartels that prey upon the population pray for the protection of Santa Muerte, the so-called Narco Saint, and for some the acceptance that the rites and deities of antiquity still exist comes easily.

Comics can boast of a big army of fans around the world, so filmmakers couldn't help but create many stunning movies based on the most popular comic books.

Lena Headey and Michael Caine turn in expected magnetic performances in this modern day loose adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, Twist.

In this version, the titular Oliver Twist (Rafferty Law) is a young adult, not a mere street urchin, who is living homeless and known for his large-scale grafitti art, which ends up in places most people would consider impossible to get to. His chance encounter with Red (Sophie Simnett) brings him to the attention of Fagin (Michael Caine), the leader of a ragtag group of apprentice con artists who are looking to set up an art dealer for a big heist, partly for the money and partly for revenge. Complicating matters emotionally for Oliver is the presence of the malevolent Sikes (Lena Headey), who has a dominant relationship with Red that interferes with her and Oliver hooking up. 

There's a part of me that thinks it simply isn't fair to write a critical review of F9: The Fast Saga. While it's little more than a bunch of action scenes, stitched together loosely with the threads of something resembling a plot, there's also the fact that it never pretends to be anything more than that, that the audience isn't intended to have their minds engaged in solving a mystery but merely to have their adrenal glands engaged through the harrowing automotive special effects.

But I'm going to do it anyway, because I need more word count than just that first paragraph.

In the world of The Purge franchise, the U.S. government has been supplanted -- through elections -- with a new breed of "founding fathers" who have pushed through laws allowing the population to participate in bloody mayhem in order to "purge" the hate from their systems so that the rest of the year might be peaceful. Beginning at sundown and ending at sunup, Purge Night gives people the right to kill anyone with impunity, with no intervention from law enforcement or other emergency services. 'Tis the season for horror movies (check these out) with Halloween incoming, thus you might wonder if The Forever Purge should be on your horror to-watch list. Let's continue.

SLAXX is the Canadian horror comedy film about the dark side of killer fashion. Produced in 2020, the film made its debut on Shudder and DVD last month to audiences worldwide.

Directed by Elza Kephart, SLAXX is the story of a young woman named Libby (Romane Denis) who takes a position at a trendy clothing store only to have her dreams of working in the fashion industry turn into her worst nightmare. The night before the big launch of the company's newest jeans, called Super Shapers, one of Libby’s co-workers steal a pair of the new jeans from the backroom and puts them on. Little does she know this particular batch of the new jeans have been possessed by the spirit of a young Hindi child laborer who died while threshing the cotton she picked to make them. Out for revenge and thirsting for blood, the jeans kill the worker and proceed to run amok through the store feeding off the blood of all its inhabitants.

When Star Trek: The Motion Picture debuted in theaters, it had been ten years since the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise had come together on television. For the fans, it was a huge event that made largely forgivable the opportunity taken by the SFX department to show how cool computer generated fractal graphics could look. It was the launchpoint for five more movies to come, sometimes calling back to the television show but mostly introducing new concepts and new aliens.

It’s always exciting to see someone take huge risks on the big screen. Check out this list of the best gambling movies of all time from different eras. 

Arrow Video brings to Blu-ray the long-awaited special edition version of Bernard McEveety’s 1971 film, The Brotherhood of Satan.

The film follows the recently widowed Ben, his girlfriend Nicky, and his daughter K.T. on a road trip across the Southwest. During the trip they are witnesses to a horrific accident and head to the nearby isolated desert town of Hillsboro to report it to the Sheriff (played by L.Q. Jones). While there, they are met with a not-too-welcoming reaction from the locals, who are gripped by paranoia and fear due to a series of gruesome deaths and the mysterious disappearance of eleven of the community’s children. As more disappearances and deaths continue during their visit, Ben and his family find themselves joining the sheriff, a local priest and the town’s doctor, Doc Duncan (Strother Martin, Cool Hand Luke), but all clues lead to an evil satanic cult that is slowly gripping the town and its inhabitants.

Marvel’s 25^th entry to their Cinematic Universe is something you don’t see Hollywood do very often. They made a film with a predominantly Asian cast, with an Asian-centric story. Most of the time, Hollywood either imports a foreign film via distribution rights (think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) or they take an Asian star like Jackie Chan and drop him into an American style film with an American actor as a co-star (think Rush Hour). Executive Producer Kevin Feige tabbed a relative newcomer Destin Daniel Cretton to direct Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Given a reasonably blank canvas to work from, Cretton has crafted a surprisingly engaging superhero film. 

There’s something inherently terrifying about the forest. In our modern world of suburbs and pizza delivery, air conditioning and streaming services, the remote, unspoiled areas beyond the city are a connection to a collective past before civilization arose. Those wooded realms hold secrets, and sprites lurk there that, once unleashed, cannot be contained, and it’s with little wonder that so many legends, myths and fairy tales are associated with such rural barrens. After all, Hansel and Gretyl follow that path into the woods and…

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” 

--Andy Warhol

The result of the social media revolution of the late 2000’s was the democratization of celebrity. During Hollywood’s Golden Era, performers had to spend years learning their craft, toiling in obscurity to pay dues and earn their iconic statuses, but in the post-YouTube world anyone with a cell phone and some spare time can ride the viral rocket to internet stardom, fulfilling pop-art guru Warhol’s most well-known pop-cultural prophecy along the way. And with an increasing amount of our individual lives taking place online, privacy itself has devolved into an uncomfortable form of currency: we willingly expose the portions of our lives we want others to see in exchange for Likes, Shares and Subscribers, yet feel betrayed and even fearful if the information we don’t disclose becomes known.

St. Louis native James Gunn makes superhero movies the way you wished they would have when you were a kid.

Presumably raised on the traditional diet of St. Louis—too-thin pizza topped with cheese that tastes like it’s still wrapped in plastic (In My Opinion, see?), toasted ravioli, frozen custard, “Old Vienna Red Hot Riplets” potato chips and Vess soda—and stacks of comic books to read while hiding indoors from the miserable summer humidity, Gunn's body of work includes the very offbeat Super (2010) and the zany Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel. As brilliant as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is, the creators all know that they're free to make their film the way they want provided it meets with the overarching blueprint of visionary MCU maestro Kevin Feige.

Finding the right movie to watch while taking a break can be difficult, especially if there is a specific movie genre niche you’re looking for. Scrolling on and on through Netflix’s recommended page just won’t do. You need to watch something that can actually let your mind go on autopilot, and the movie “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

The frustration that you may be feeling right now is relatable. In fact, it’s the very same feeling that people get when they can’t find a good legal online casino Canada. Frankly, it’s tiring to keep looking for things that turn out to be nothing. You just want to relax and enjoy your movie or game, but the movies that they’re recommending are not only bland or boring- but you’ve already watched them before!

Once the undisputed King of Hollywood, the Western, that chest-thumping, two-fisted, oh-so-American cinematic ode to Manifest Destiny, fell into disarray towards the end of the 1970’s. Long past its mid-century heyday, the one-time silver-screen stalwart had experienced a surge in the previous decade due to a new, realistic approach to storytelling, but a combination of cultural factors—burnout from the war in Vietnam, drugs, struggles for social equality, the advent of dazzling special effects, new types of male icons—made the Western seem as antiquated as the Pony Express. Clichéd, predicable plots and tired stock characters withered in the face of burgeoning ’80’s theater extravaganzas. In the wake of Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones, Rocky, Rambo and Schwarzenegger du jour, how could any simple cowpoke possibly hold his own down at the local bijou?

Sam (Karen Gillan, Doctor Who) was abandoned as a teenager by her mother, Scarlet (Lena Headey), after she took the initiative to take an unsanctioned assassination. Now Sam follows in her mother's footsteps as a deadly killer in the employ of the wide-reaching agency called The Firm, headed up by her mentor, Nathan (Paul Giamatti). But when Sam's last job ends up with a victim with a powerful father, Nathan is no longer able to protect her.

Complicating matters, Sam's current job is to take out a target who stole from The Firm, and bring back the money. But what Sam walks into is the ransom delivery for a kidnapping of 8-year-old (excuse me, 8 and three-quarters) Emily (Chloe Coleman). Unable to leave a child abandoned and feeling personally responsible for Emily's well-being, Sam must defend the both of them from an endless army from both The Firm and a bereaved mobster father (Ralph Ineson).

Pixie Hardy (Olivia Cooke, Ready Player One) is the daughter of a mob boss (Colm Meaney) who, with peace having existed between his rivals, spends his later years learning how to be the perfect homemaker and single father.. But Pixie wants more than "this provincial life," and concocts a plan to steal a large quantity of drug money from another mob, one led by Father McGrath (Alec Baldwin) and the gun-toting priests and nuns in his employ.

Sexual activity in horror cinema is the riskiest of frisky film endeavors. Innumerable hormone-fueled teenagers have lost their celluloid lives at the hands of homicidal, masked slashers brimming with twisted Freudian menace and toting weaponry that reinforces their conspicuous phallic intent. The equation of sex = death is well known even to casual viewers, so much that the formula became institutionalized, then parodied; Scream built a franchise upon deconstructing the link between amorous coupling and murder, but from the potent eroticism present in Bela Lugosi’s Dracula leer to Rosemary’s Baby to Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive and the more blatant sexually-transmitted fatalities of 2015’s It Follows, the notion that physical intimacy begets personal destruction is mined with frightening consistency.

With a career spanning over 60 years and 22 films, Greek Director Nico Mastorakis -- known for such films as Island of Death, The Zero Boys, and Bloodstone -- learned his craft on his own, starting in television work before graduating to music videos and feature films. His freshman feature, Death has Blue Eyes, is in no way his best work, but you can tell his television studies were paying off, and showing through this film that he did know how to shoot a scene like a seasoned director.

Death has Blue Eyes can only be summed up as a paranormal thriller, a buddy film, and a softcore porn that fails miserably at all three genres.  It starts as we follow a young con man and his friend into a few misadventures before they ultimately meet their match in the form of two women (one younger, one older) who have a secret themselves: they are psychics on the run from a group of men out to capture them.

In 1996, the cold war spy thriller series, Mission: Impossible, made the leap from fan-favorite television series to big budget theatrical production. The potential for a franchise out of this was great -- and realized, with several M:I films having been released since.

It was clear from the beginning that a torch was going to have to be passed from IMF leader Jim Phelps (with Jon Voight playing the role made iconic by Peter Graves) to the new guy, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Old time fans were prepared to accept that. But what they weren't prepared for was the absolutely disrespectful way Phelps was removed from duty. It's been 25 years, so I really shouldn't have to worry about a spoiler warning at this point, but if that sort of thing bothers you, this is the last paragraph you want to read of this review.