5 Best Movies To Watch After Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000)
Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver
My favorite moments in Rebel Moon: Part Two - The Scargiver come during quick breaths before a plunge. In the first, warriors Tarak (Staz Nair) and Milius (Elise Duffy) come to terms with their likely imminent deaths at the hands of a smoke-spewing tank. Having spent years of his life consumed by survivor's guilt, Tarak thought having a cause to die for would be enough. It isn't. He wants to live, but he probably won't. The next best thing is to die fighting alongside a peer like Milius. In the second, Kora (Sofia Boutella) is in the midst of blasting her way through the fearsome dreadnought King's Gaze. After slaying a warrior wielding a high-tech superheated sword, she takes a moment to catch her breath. With some pilfered cloth, she wraps the blade's hilt so she can use it without burning herself. It's a moment of improvisation, providing Boutella a chance to deliver a quieter piece of physical acting that stands in contrast to brawling with a corridor of goons or swordfighting Ed Skrein's Admiral Noble. Continue Reading →
Memory
Both the main characters in Michel Franco’s Memory are struggling to deal with the echoes of their past. Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), a recovering alcoholic and single mother to 13-year-old Anna (Brooke Timber), desperately wants to forget the unspoken traumas of her childhood. Saul (Peter Saarsgard), on the other hand, can’t grab a hold of his past. He’s powerless as early-onset dementia slowly but inevitably steals it from him. After their high school reunion, he wordlessly follows her home and spends the night standing outside her building. In turn, she visits him at the house he shares with his brother (Josh Charles) and niece (Elsie Fisher). Then she takes him for a walk and accuses him of participating in a rape that she endured at the age of 12, a crime that he has no memory of committing. Continue Reading →
Sayen: La cazadora
At the risk of making a "getting a lot of Sorcerer vibes from this" guy out of myself, The Hunted—William Friedkin's 2003 old-master-hunts-rogue-student thriller really does make for a fascinating counterpart to his earlier men-on-a-desperate-mission masterwork. Both delve into the lives of damaged, forlorn, isolated men on perilous quests for deliverance. And both of those quests lead deep into madness. Both pointedly contrast man-made, flame-choked hellscapes (Sorcerer's exploding oil well, The Hunted's secret mission amidst the Kosovo War) with the vast, amoral green of the deep forest (Columbia and Oregon, respectively). Both turn on setpieces that thrill while maintaining a grounded (if not necessarily "realistic") feel and weave surreality in with care. Continue Reading →
Free Fire
The plot of Free Fire, in many ways, could not be more straightforward. A mix of thugs, gun runners, and revolutionaries meet up to exchange weapons in a Boston warehouse in the 1970s. Things go wrong in a hurry. Continue Reading →