Thriller

Hit & Run

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Hit & Run
  • IMDB: link

hit-and-run-posterWritten, co-directed, and starring Dax Shepard Hit & Run is, simply put, a mess of a film likely to remind viewers of similar recent train wrecks such as Smokin’ Aces and Catch .44. Shepard stars as Charlie Bronson, a getaway driver from Los Angeles now living in the middle of nowhere in the Witness Protection Program. When his girlfriend Annie (Kristen Bell) gets an interview for her dream job in Los Angeles, Charlie throws caution to the wind and decides to go with her.

Their road to L.A. is complicated by Annie’s stalker ex-boyfriend Gil (Michael Rosenbaum) intent on proving Charlie is nothing but a crook, Charlie’s ridiculous United States Marshal (Tom Arnold) in charge of his safety, and the even more ridiculous Alex Dimitri (Bradley Cooper) the man who Charlie testified against and is still looking for revenge. Gil, knowing Charlie’s secret, contacts Dimitri in a last-ditch attempt to win back Annie by getting her current boyfriend killed. Yeah… that’s the kind of logic central to ever single plot point in Hit & Run.

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Gone

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Gone
  • IMDB: link

gone-dvdOne year after Jill (Amanda Seyfried) was kidnapped by a serial killer her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) disappears without a trace leaving the excitable young woman to believe the kidnapper has returned. The police (Daniel Sunjata, Jennifer Carpenter), who could find no physical evidence to back up Jill’s story of the first kidnapping once again believe the young woman with a history of mental illness is simply letting her imagination get away with her.

For Gone to work both stories need to be given equal weight, but despite Jill’s increasingly erratic behavior (which only grows because everyone refuses to help her) we know something has happened to her sister and Jill isn’t simply imagining the situation. The film follows the same movie logic of plenty of thrillers where dumb movie cops aren’t able to solve a crime for an entire year but one woman with no training is able to track the killer back to his lair in a single day. She also proves to have a remarkable ability to elude detection when an entire city’s police force is looking for her.

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Martha Marcy May Marlene

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Martha Marcy May Marlene
  • IMDB: link

martha-marcy-may-marlene-dvdElizabeth Olsen stars in writer/director Sean Durkin‘s story of a woman’s struggles to reassmilate with the outside world after living in a cult for two years. Durkin’s tale is a slow burn thriller that jumps between flashbacks of Martha’s (Olsen) time in the Catskill Mountains and her present paranoia and uncertainty now that she’s left that world behind.

Out of the blue Lucy (Sarah Paulson), receives a phone call from a phone call from her younger sister and brings Martha home to live with her and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). The longer Martha stays with the couple the more obvious it becomes that there is something seriously wrong with her.

Not only does Martha not understand basic boundaries (like not coming into her sister’s room and laying down on the bed when Lucy is having sex with her husband), but she’s also haunted by memories of the cult, which she will not discuss with her sister, and feels increasingly suspicious that they are still watching her and laying in wait to bring her back into their family.

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Safe House

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Safe House
  • IMDB: link

safe-house-posterSafe House just goes to show you that Hollywood can find a way to take even one of the most boring jobs of any CIA agent would ever have and turn it into an action thriller with a horde of nameless bad guys who never seem to run out of ammunition.

The first thing you need to understand about Safe House is that very little of the film’s close to two-hour running time actually takes place in a safe house. Ryan Reynolds stars as Agent Matt Weston who has spent the last 12 months keeping an empty safe house in South Africa ready in case the CIA needs to safeguard, interrogate, or house someone in the area at a moment’s notice.

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
  • IMDB: link

tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-posterSmiley. George Smiley. Reinterpreting John le Carré’s novel for the big screen director Tomas Alfredson and screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan drop the audience into the middle of a Cold War British spy tale centered around five senior intelligence officers under suspicion of being a Soviet mole.

Gary Oldman stars as George Smiley, the right hand of the former Head of the Service (John Hurt) who was pushed out the door with his friend. Smiley is coaxed out of retirement by Oliver Lancum (Simon McBurney) after an operation in Hungary ends in disaster when an agent (Mark Strong) is shot while trying to buy intelligence from a Hungarian informant.

Smiley is charged with discovering the truth of the rumor that there is a high-ranking Soviet mole inside the “Circus” (what those who work for MI6 and the SIS call home). To do so he will have to work outside the bounds of the Circus, hiding the fact that any investigation is in progress to some of the smartest and most paranoid men in the entire country.

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