3 Best Movies To Watch After Lions for Lambs (2007)

My mother was not much of a movie fan. They just never interested her that much, but when it became obvious that I was obsessed with them by the time I reached preschool age, she did nothing to discourage me. Every once in a while she'd let me know that the feature on the The 3:30 Movie (my primary outlet for watching films in those pre-cable, pre-VCR days) was something that I had to watch. Oddly, her instincts often proved to be correct and I was exposed at a very early (perhaps inappropriately so age to such films as The Producers, Duel and the Joan Rivers-penned TV movie The Girl Most Likely To. . ., all of which would be long-standing favorites of mine. Continue Reading →

One of the things I enjoy most about the moviegoing experience is coming out of a film feeling as if I've actually learned something that I didn't know before, or had not even occurred to me in the first place. That's exactly the feeling that I got while watching Sam Pollard’s The League, a documentary about the history of Negro baseball leagues in America. Going in, I suppose I knew the basics about the subject and could name such key figures as Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, but Pollard, who previously directed MLK/FBI, and executive producer Questlove delve much deeper, and the results are indeed fascinating. Continue Reading →

The action all-star pushes his limits in James Nunn's tense, daring single-shot tactical shooter. Present day. Present time. A helicopter arrives on an island, home to a soon-to-be-shuttered US prison. Intelligence analyst Zoe Anderson (Ashley Greene Khoury, Accident Man) is in the field for the first time. She has come to the island to retrieve a prisoner, Amin Mansour (Waleed Elgadi, Mosul) who she believes knows the location of a dirty bomb set to go off in Washington. Anderson is accompanied by a small team of Navy SEALS, led by the cooly professional Lieutenant Jake Harris (Scott Adkins). Standing in Anderson and Harris' way is the arrogant prison chief Jack Yorke (Ryan Phillippe, The Way of the Gun), who'd rather brutalize the men in his custody to slake his desire for vengeance than do his damn job. It's about then that a joint army of Islamist radicals and bloodthirsty mercenaries attack and everything goes right to hell. Led by the cunning, sadistic, and supposed-to-have-been-dead French-Algerian freelancer Hakim Charef (UFC fighter Jess Liaudin), this vicious crew of mega-creeps wants Mansour dead. Boxed in, Anderson, Harris, his team (Emmanuel Imani, Dino Kelly, and Jack Parr) and prison staffer Tom Shields (Terence Maynard, The Witcher) must fight to re-establish contact with the outside world and keep Mansour alive. And Mansour, a grieving man with both reason to despise the U.S. and far more of a conscience than Charef, must do whatever he can to survive. Continue Reading →