The Latest Reviews For The Country Morocco

Throughout the near-240 minutes of Showtime’s Ghosts of Beirut, the four-part espionage thriller introduces dozens of characters scattered across the Middle East. CIA agents, Mossad operatives, and various members of the Islamic Jihad Organization all get time within these four hours of television. Creators Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz attempt to give all perspectives in this story, including that of terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, the central figure of this story, and so, the series consistently remains too limited.  Continue Reading →

I'll say this for Simon Kinberg: he's got to be just about the nicest man in show business. After all, how do you get a second chance at the director's chair after the unmitigated disaster that was X-Men: Dark Phoenix? According to interviews, he only got that gig at the insistence of Jennifer Lawrence, who would only do the film with him in charge (he was reportedly very easy to work with when Bryan Singer went AWOL on X-Men Apocalypse, forcing Kinberg to pick up the baton). While working on Dark Phoenix, Jessica Chastain approached Kinberg with the idea of starring in and producing a female-led spy franchise a la Mission: Impossible; and so we have The 355, a film seemingly tailor-made to be the kind of mid-budget dross we get every January. Look out, Liam Neeson, you've got competition! Continue Reading →

Despite its top shelf cast & capable direction, this drama about tourists behaving badly is nothing we haven't seen before. The Forgiven is a story about fantastically rich white people behaving badly in an “exotic” location, told by slightly less rich and hopefully better intentioned white people. So soon after HBO’s The White Lotus, it might be tempting to call this a new trend. But it’s probably more accurate to consider it business as usual.  This is not to say that it’s a bad film. The Forgiven is thoroughly competent in its writing, direction, and performances. It also happens to be — from its first scenes and the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-esque dynamic it establishes between its protagonists, to its ending which is  strongly foreshadowed to the point of telegraphing — an obvious one.  Continue Reading →

Amazon's adaptation of the Roberto Saviano novel is far too passive and jumbled to capture your interest. “Look at cocaine and all you see is powder. Look through cocaine and you see the world,” says the tagline to Roberto Saviano’s book, ZeroZeroZero. Now an eight-part mini-series on Amazon Prime, the show promises the same. It purports to be the whole picture of the cocaine trade from the Italian buyers to the Mexican sellers to the American brokers. We follow the effects of a single shipment of cocaine on the lives of people spread across multiple continents. Unfortunately, showrunners Stefano Sollima, Leonardo Fasoli, and Mauricio Katz’s attempt is unwieldy and unfocused. Reviews of the source material reported similar issues, with Saviano’s narrative often lacking, well... narrative structure. You’d hope that the show would seek to correct this by streamlining Saviano’s many interviews into a cohesive picture, but it ends up replicating them instead. It does simplify the cast of characters, however. We focus mainly on three sets of people: the tumultuous relationship between an Italian mobster grandson (Giuseppe De Domenico) and his grandfather (Adriano Chiaramida) who plan to buy the cocaine shipment; the American brother (Dane DeHaan) and sister (Andrea Riseborough) brokering the deal; and the Mexican soldier turned narco (Harold Torres) doing the selling.  Continue Reading →