Using brilliantly ominous visuals and an amazingly unsettling musical score, Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy serves up a simple story that isn’t on the same level of competence as those technical achievements. Cage and Andrea Riseborough (The Death of Stalin) play Red and Mandy, a soft-spoken bohemian couple who are suddenly captured and tortured by a travelling crew of cultists. When his girlfriend is kidnapped and used as a pawn for a “special” ritual, Red has no other desire…
Mom and Dad is a touchy sell, even if the film is up front with its maniacal plot about parents killing their children and how it shoots for the moon in terms of dark comedy.
By: Addison Wylie The Frozen Ground tells a harrowing true story in a plain Jane conventional way. The emotional weight and stress in the hunt for a notorious Alaskan serial killer rings, but its narrative formatting is determined to make it unmemorable, placing Scott Walker’s film awash in a homicidal sea with other generic crime thrillers. The Frozen Ground feels dialled back regarding its aggressiveness towards the audience and its lead performance from Nicolas Cage…
By: Addison Wylie TV spots for the Dreamworks/20th Century Fox collaboration entitled The Croods describe the prehistoric family as “the first modern family” – I suppose, trying to connect this new animated family to a current popular commodity. It shouldn’t stoop that low because The Croods is a good film and has every right to stand on its own. Grugg (voiced by Nicolas Cage who sounds as if he’s been longing for an animated role)…