By: Jolie Featherstone Marlowe, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of John Banville’s (a.k.a. Benjamin Black) novel The Black-Eyed Blonde, brings Philip Marlowe (a character created by novelist Raymond Chandler) to life in a sunny noir set in a luscious, pre-WWII Californian town where everyone is trying to climb the ladder of success – no matter the cost.
Blue’s Big City Adventure, the first feature-length outing for the problem-solving pooch, is a comfortable ride for fans of Nickelodeon’s long-running interactive franchise Blue’s Clues. The movie fits the traditional narrative flow of the program while also exploring a personal scope without calling attention to its own cleverness.
By: Jeff Ching Knives Out was a surprise hit. But while it was a fun murder mystery, it wasn’t particularly memorable for me, nor was I clamouring for a sequel. When I read that Netflix had spent $450 million on two sequels, I could not justify why they would spend that much…though I also asked why they would spend $200 million on The Gray Man. After watching Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, I believe the…
Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) aspires to give audiences a different type of police procedural with Decision to Leave, but I’m afraid he’s put too much of his focus on trying to deliver innovation rather than a story that’s either compelling or accessible.
Set in the theatre district of London’s West End in 1953, a production of Agatha Christie’s whodunit The Mousetrap seems to be cursed after the body of flagrant director Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody) turns up dead after the show. The jaded Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and rookie investigator Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) are assigned to the case, and it seems as if everyone’s a suspect: the actors, the crew, the waiting staff and, to Stalker’s…
By: Jolie Featherstone When second-generation homicide detective Riley Sanders (Jacque Gray) returns to work after a traumatic experience, she’s partnered with the idealistic and stoic Paul Carr (Devin Liljenquist). When Paul brings Riley up to speed on current cases, they realize that two of the crimes are very similar: the victims were bound in enclosed spaces and died of heart attacks. Their investigation leads them to find that the killer is targeting people with clinically-diagnosed…
The Kid Detective has done the best job, in recent memory, explaining why a mystery’s leading sleuth is such a sad sack. The enigmatic and eccentric personality has become such a cliché in the genre, that the audience just expects and accepts the detective to be grizzled, or unhappy, or an unpredictable hot head. In The Kid Detective, Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody) carries those traits, but writer/director Evan Morgan provides compelling motivation which fuels Brody’s top-form…
By: Trevor Chartrand A plain and passable thriller, The Postcard Killings is stamped with mild mystery and timid intrigue that ultimately doesn’t deliver a whole lot of punch.
At the same time John Turturro’s Big Lewbowski spin-off The Jesus Rolls bowls into theatres, a more faithful adaptation of the Coen Brothers’ style and wit is released – Albert Shin’s Disappearance at Clifton Hill.
By: Jolie Featherstone Director Rian Johnson (Looper, Star Wars: Episode XIII – The Last Jedi) makes a triumphant return to his whodunnit-loving form with Knives Out. Fourteen years after his much-loved debut feature, Brick, a passionately-told film noir set in a modern-day Southern California high school, Johnson’s Knives Out charmed audiences with one of the most talked-about films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.