By Any Means Review: Sunlit Noir With Blood on Its Hands
Elegance Bratton turns noir inside out by forcing its moral shadows into Mississippi daylight. The danger in By Any Means...
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Martin McDonagh has made another film about two men waiting for death, yet Wild Horse Nine changes the emotional equation by giving one of them decades of political violence to remember and very little time left to remember it correctly. The year is 1973. CIA operatives Chris Carlisle and Lee Chesterfield are stationed in Chile while Salvador Allende’s government moves toward the military coup that will arrive in September. Chris, played by John Malkovich, has spent decades participating in American interventions abroad. He recalls Guatemala, Congo and Cuba with the brisk efficiency of someone reading old expense reports. The implication...

Elegance Bratton turns noir inside out by forcing its moral shadows into Mississippi daylight. The danger in By Any Means rarely hides in alleyways or rooms designed for secrecy. It sits in sunlit roads, modest homes, government offices, and faces already trained to understand that the law can witness terror without stopping it. Corruption occupies the visible surface of respectable order. That choice gives the film a strong visual argument, then its crime-thriller instincts begin testing how long the argument can survive the pleasure of violent retaliation. The story places FBI agent Wayne Strider, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, beside...

Giving Lucie Manette a profession, a sexual will, and a hand in her own rescue changes the moral balance of this adaptation before the guillotine ever enters the frame. The change is deliberate. Lucie is no longer positioned chiefly as the moral light around which damaged men arrange themselves. She studies surgery in secret, pursues the truth about her imprisoned father, and becomes an active force in the fates of Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. A Tale of Two Cities uses that redistribution of agency as its clearest argument for modernization. The difficulty arrives when the same instinct begins simplifying...

Height becomes useless as suspense when the frame cannot measure the drop. Scott Mann's original Fall solved the problem with brutal simplicity: two bodies on a narrow tower surrounded by open air, every angle keeping the ground impossibly far below. Fall 2: Deadpoint replaces that naked exposure with a mountainside of planks, ladders, rock, rain and unstable metal. The extra hazards give directors Michael and Peter Spierig more ways to threaten their climbers, yet the cliff itself often hides the depth that gives those threats force. Jax (Harriet Slater) reaches Mount Kwan carrying grief for her sister Shiloh, whose death...

The most unsettling images in “Everest: The Other Side” are not the avalanches or the endless walls of ice. They are the quiet moments before the climb, when Jim Morrison prepares to continue a dream that belonged to him and Hilaree Nelson. The documentary understands that a mountain expedition can carry emotional weight long before anyone reaches the summit. Directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the film follows Morrison’s attempt to climb Everest’s North Face and ski back down the Chinese side, a feat no one had completed before. The challenge already carries historic significance, yet the story...

The most revealing images in Lomu are not the ones where Jonah Lomu tears through defenders. They are the quieter frames surrounding those moments: a young man caught between inherited traditions, public expectation and a body that would eventually betray him. Directors Gavin Fitzgerald and Vea Mafile’o approach their subject as a figure shaped by competing forces, using four chapters marked by Tongan proverbs to examine a life that could never be contained by a rugby field. The documentary understands the danger of turning an athlete into a monument. Monuments are clean. Lomu was not. He was a Tongan son...
Elegance Bratton turns noir inside out by forcing its moral shadows into Mississippi daylight. The danger in By Any Means...
Read moreDetailsHeight becomes useless as suspense when the frame cannot measure the drop. Scott Mann's original Fall solved the problem with...
Read moreDetailsThe modern media ecosystem did not arrive with a single invention or a sudden collapse of standards. It was assembled...
Read moreDetailsThe Cold War was built on the idea that two nations could stare at each other for decades without ever...
Read moreDetailsThe Paper Season 2 understands the strange rule of workplace comedy: the more desperately people try to look professional, the...
Read moreDetailsJane Fonda used her turn on stage at Venice's DVF Awards this week to renew her opposition to Paramount Skydance's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, warning the $111 billion deal would raise consumer prices and cost thousands of industry jobs even as she praised the personal character of the...
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Read moreMartin McDonagh has made another film about two men waiting for death, yet Wild Horse Nine changes the emotional equation by giving one of them decades of political violence to...
Jane Fonda used her turn on stage at Venice's DVF Awards this week to renew her opposition to Paramount Skydance's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, warning the $111 billion...
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