Shameless Self Expression

Wesley Snipes is a treasury agent whose partner gets killed on an undercover bust gone wrong. Now he’s hell-bent on tracking down the guilty party, who turns out to be Viggo Mortensen. Mortensen is the younger sidekick of no-good con artist Dennis Hopper, a career screw-up in a seriously tight spot, who is setting the younger guy up on his latest scam involving counterfeit money. Hopper is trying to get his life back on track after a stint in the can, but he’s already $50,000 in debt to mobster/loan shark Tony Lo Bianco, and that guy ain’t messing around. Snipes, who is being transferred in a week, and Hopper, who is given a week to pay his debt to Lo Bianco, are obviously headed for a collision. Caught in between these two men is prostitute Lolita Davidovich, whose services both men hire. Valerie Perrine is Hopper’s long-suffering waitress ex-girlfriend whose good books he is attempting to get back into, whilst Snipes has his own ex, who he shares a son with. Seymour Cassel and To...

Canadian actress-filmmaker and critical darling Sarah Polley looks inward to her own family, and in particular the story behind her conception and the story of her mother, who died when Sarah was 11. In an attempt to understand the actress mother she lost at quite a young age, Sarah learns her mum lived quite a colourful life, and her family’s story as she knows it, might not be entirely accurate and all-encompassing.   This 2013 supposed documentary from filmmaker Sarah Polley infuriated me to no end. The reasons for this mean that this review will be spoiler city, so if ever there was a review to leave until after you’ve seen the film, it’s this one. The spoiler information is definitely the main talking point. So those of you yet to see the film…well, I really think you needn’t bother seeing it, but if you must, CEASE READING.   Now that we’re alone, let me count the ways I hated this film. I’ll get to the spoilers right away, actually. This isn’t your typic...

Kurt Russell is Crunch Calhoun, an expert art thief whose team specialise in forging (Chris Diamantopoulos is their expert forger) seriously expensive paintings to the point where they pass all tests, and can sell them on the black market without their ‘marks’ realising they’ve been screwed. Unfortunately, after their latest gig goes bad, and his a-hole half-brother Nicky (Matt Dillon) rats everybody else out so that he can get off clean, Crunch ends up doing 7 years in a Polish prison. After this, Crunch goes legit and becomes a low-rent Evel Knieval-style stuntman, with young Jay Baruchel as his apprentice/gopher, and married to Kathryn Winnick’s Lola. And then out of nowhere, Nicky shows up with a ‘sure thing’. After trying to beat the shit out of his half-brother, and after his beloved bike gets stolen by some goons looking for Nicky, Crunch listens to Nicky’s latest plan about stealing an apparently rare book called The Gospel According to James, forging several copies to sell...

Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace play a couple of top advertising execs, with McAdams the more senior and cutthroat of the two. Fond of taking credit for Rapace’s ideas, McAdams fucks with her head, manipulating, seducing, and dominating her. When McAdams learns that Rapace is sleeping with one of her boytoys, McAdams then turns to cruelly humiliating her. Karoline Herfurth plays Rapace’s clearly love-struck, dedicated assistant. This 2012 remake of the 2010 French film “Love Crime” is really just writer-director Brian De Palma ( “The Untouchables” , “Body Double” , “Dressed to Kill” , “Blow Out” ) doing what Brian De Palma far too often does, with his obsession over Hitchcock, unnecessary split-screen, and doppelgangers/twin sisters. At least “Femme Fatale” gave us some great lesbionics before sinking down the rabbit hole, this one gives us a couple of passion-less pecks, a terrible Pino Donaggio ( “Don’t Look Now” , “Blow Out” , “Body Double” , “Raising Cain” ) score, and a c...

The story of WikiLeaks and its Aussie founder and former hacker Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who creates a way for anonymous whistle-blowers to reveal important government/corporate secrets, as well as news leaks published online. Before long, it seems as though WikiLeaks is breaking all the important news stories first. However, eventually Assange and his German colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Bruhl, playing a character whose book the film is partly based on) become news themselves as WikiLeaks ends up in possession of a whole slew of sensitive U.S. intelligence documents that Assange wants to release. When their lives could possibly be in danger, Daniel urges Assange to stop and think before releasing the documents. But the egotistical Assange is undeterred (‘Editing is bias’ he says at one point), and Daniel becomes extremely disillusioned with what WikiLeaks has seemingly become. David Thewlis plays a more traditional news journalist, whilst Laura Linney, Anth...