23 Best Crime Releases on Fubotv

It is, perhaps, unseemly to admit. Still, the fact that Jeremy Renner, who plays morally conflicted series protagonist Mike McLusky, survived a near-death experience does give Mayor of Kingstown Season 3 a draw that the crime show might not otherwise have. What’s immediately apparent in the series opener—and more than a little surprising—is how good Renner looks onscreen. While Mike, the character, is burdened with the weight of Kingstown’s concerns and his sin, Renner, the actor, seems lighter somehow. It doesn’t undermine the performance, though. Instead, it adds a dimension. For the first time, Mike seems like he’s rushing. It gives him—and season 3—a stronger sense of immediacy. It’s as though he’s seeing a different crisis, one bigger but not as immediate, coming down the road, and he’s rushing to set his house in order before it arrives. If anything, Mayor of Kingstown Season 3 would do well to better match its star’s energy and anxiety. The series has plenty of activity but no real sense of forward momentum. In real life, bringing change to a place like Kingstown would be a miserable challenge. So it is realistic when things barely change or do change only to be threatened by figures from the past, like Merle Callahan (Richard Brake), darkening Kingstown’s doorstep. Continue Reading →

The film's biggest highlight is the actor as an unlikely hero: a beekeeper-turned-assassin. Bees, scammers, and a hive of lies. Jason Statham’s latest record-breaking feature The Beekeeper is honey-soaked, with wisdom that leaves the viewer wanting more and learning to be wary of scammers, stop elder abuse, and save the bees. As he aggressively fights to save the bees (and society) from total destruction, Statham serves up the same kind of grizzled Brit-buster vibes he's given us through decades of punch-em-up action. But this one's something special, a caper that leans into the meme of both Statham's curious star power and his apian brethren. Directed by David Ayer, The Beekeeper tells the story of Adam Clay (Jason Statham), a beekeeper and retired member of the crime-fighting organization of the same name. But when his elderly neighbor Mrs. Parker (Phylicia Rashad) is subject to scammers and loses everything, Adam goes on a mission to find the scammers and kill their operation to “protect the hive.” His journey leads him all the way to the White House, even involving the FBI and CIA. Continue Reading →

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →

The Scream franchise's strength has always been in its self-awareness. Initially, it turned the camera towards the audience, demanding that they ask themselves why it's so entertaining to see other people being made to suffer, and what happens if, as the tagline went, someone took their love of scary movies too far. Then it mocked the inevitability of sequels, then the movie industry in general, then how the media treats trauma victims like celebrities, with varying levels of success. The 2022 reboot, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, sought to address all of it in some fashion, with toxic fandom on top of that. It was mostly successful, despite being at times aggressively meta. Scream VI does much of the same, although this time the knowing winks and nods are starting to feel a little tired. Continue Reading →

Taking a look at the offerings of Slamdance, Park City's more indie-minded festival. Initially developed in 1995 as an alternative to the more polished version of independent cinema presented at Sundance, the Slamdance Film Festival has evolved over the past 28 years. These days, with a few exceptions, most of Slamdance’s slate could easily compete with those films chosen for that other festival. In fact, several proved better made and more interesting than much of Sundance’s selections. This year’s winner of the Slamdance Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature, Linh Tran’s Waiting for the Light to Change, proved entirely worthy of the accolades. Set at a lake house in Michigan during winter’s last gasp, the film centers on a getaway trip gone wrong. For high school sweethearts Jay (Sam Straley) and Kim (Joyce Ha), the occasion is a chance to reunite with their friend Amy (Jin Park) after she’s been several hundred miles away in California working on her Masters. Jay’s stepbrother Alex (Erik Barrientos) and Kim’s cousin from China, Lin (Qun Chi), round out the quintet.   Continue Reading →

I love mysteries and crime stories. And it's been a treat these past few years to have so many good detective stories on television (Under the Banner of Heaven, for instance) and in cinemas (Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc mysteries, the quite charming Confess, Fletch). Would that I could count Neil Jordan's Marlowe among them. I cannot. It's a bad movie, and bad in a very frustrating fashion—no one's phoning it in, but nothing connects outside of a few stray moments save for David Holmes' no-disclaimers excellent score. Continue Reading →

In Season 2, Hunters remains dedicated to exploring whether vengeance and justice can ever be one and the same. Continue Reading →

Disaster vacation films are a dime dozen. Audiences see a sun-drenched location and they know – something is afoot. Nonetheless, Hulu is looking to join the genre with their newest, The Drop. Directed by Sarah Adina Smith, The Drop follows a group of friends as they gather for a destination wedding, only to have a shocking incident disturb the celebration. The Drop may not reinvent the “trip gone wrong” trope. Still, its stellar cast and sharp director know how to dig deep to find the weird unease hanging around friends on vacation.    Continue Reading →

Jon Hamm is a darn good comic actor, and he's a darn good comic actor with range. In Top Gun: Maverick for instance he played Naval Airboss Cyclone's abiding sternness and exasperation with Maverick for solid straight man work. Confess Fletch—which Hamm leads as unlicensed detective Irwin Maurice "Fletch" Fletcher (previously played by Chevy Chase in 1985's Fletch), by contrast, sees the Mad Men star go quietly goofy to strong effect. Even in a film packed with colorful and more openly eccentric weirdos, Hamm's Fletch is an odd man. Continue Reading →

Although histories of Hollywood in the 1970s tend to include Brian De Palma alongside the so-called “movie brats” who helped to revolutionize the film industry at that time (Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola), his films never came close to reaching the critical and/or commercial peaks they had.  Continue Reading →

Even if you’re not familiar with Agatha Christie’s vast body of works—she wrote sixty-six detective novels alone—you’ve probably heard of Hercule Poirot. He’s the world’s most famous literary detective, next to Sherlock Holmes. Death on the Nile marks Kenneth Branagh’s second outing directing one of Christie’s Poirot stories and starring as the mustachioed detective himself, following 2017’s tepidly received Murder on the Orient Express. Dogged by COVID-19 delays and scandals surrounding star Armie Hammer, Death on the Nile sometimes feels like it’s scrambling to justify its own existence, and only half-succeeds. Continue Reading →

KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer. Caper films are competitions. Outside of the obvious cops and robbers struggle, they, more importantly, dispute the value of things and who deserves to own them. While classically most capers are individuals vs institutions, there is a subgenre of capers that features an Odd Couple pair of thieves in a competitive mentorship and centers the push and pull between them. Semi-recent entries like Entrapment (1999) and The Score (2001) are examples where the struggle between the thieves is a generational one with the old and new guards having to learn from each other. Couched within the larger struggles of value and property, these interpersonal battles between thieves play out an additional competition over cultural differences and ideas. Continue Reading →

Back in 1998, Gus Van Sant released his remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It wasn’t a good movie, but it provided two decent critical talking points. Firstly, was it actually a remake, or was it another adaptation of Robert Bloch’s novel? Given that Van Sant’s film was a shot-for-shot recreation of its 1960 predecessor save for two or three differences, it was a rarity in that, given its context, it ended up being the former. It, for all its failures in execution, used semiotics to circumvent the aforementioned semantics of its identity. Continue Reading →

Mike Wade (Scott Adkins) thought he could make it in Mixed Martial Arts, he really did. He couldn't. With his career definitively over, Mike and his pride have to figure out what to do with themselves. A temporary gig on the crew tearing down Birmingham, Alabama's infamous Castle Heights hospital is better than nothing—it even leads to a friendship with fellow crew member George (Vas Sanchez, Cobra Kai seasons one and two). But Mike's still lost in himself, still processing the fact that his dream is capital letters DONE. And then, on the last day of demolition, mere hours before the explosives are set to go off, Mike finds a $100 bill. A $100 bill that leads to a cool three million in cash, hidden in a wall. Continue Reading →

It is difficult to imagine the people who, after Dexter’s largely despised series finale, felt that more Dexter would solve the problem. When you recall the last season of Dexter was also largely despised, it becomes even more challenging. Add in that, for many, the writing on the wall started even earlier, and it becomes damn near impossible. And yet, here is Dexter: New Blood. Continue Reading →

If you happen to stumble upon the Wikipedia page for Spiral, the ninth and newest feature film in the Saw franchise, you find a goldmine full of stories, exaggerations, and words strung together that you hardly believe are real. Chris Rock, the star and executive producer of Spiral, ran into Michael Burns, the Vice Chairman of Lionsgate, at a friend’s wedding in Brazil. They chatted about the horror genre, with Rock expressing intent to take his career on a different path.  Continue Reading →

What Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films portray is a perfect amalgamation of the magical and limiting aspects of Hollywood cinema in a perfectly composed, morally ambiguous fantasy. I’m only discussing the first two here because of their proximity to one another and them embodying a 70’s theme and aesthetic that prided on American stories – Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Patton, Breaking Away, Dog Day Afternoon, and Rocky to name a few – make them distinctly different for what I want to say than the third movie, which seems like a forgotten stepchild of the 90’s.  Continue Reading →

The Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Organized Crime crossover event on April 1st  will mark not only the premiere of a new Law & Order spinoff, but also the return of one Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni). For the first 12 seasons of SVU Stabler and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) were the SVU team, the perfect partners. Continue Reading →

Where’s the line between a messy movie and a movie that’s a mess? Joel Schumacher’s clearly-flawed Flawless oozes with subplots while it tries to fulfill the obligations of an “unexpected buddy” movie. Like the pre-gentrification East Village that it’s built around, characters and cultures clash to chaotic, uneven results. Continue Reading →