Category Archives: Crime

Who Killed Maggie Moore(s)? review — Comedy crime thriller worth seeing for Hamm and Fey, not much else

July 18, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by John Slattery | Written by Paul Bernbaum | 99 min | ▲▲△△△ | VOD and Digital Mad Men fans will likely recognize the filmmaker's name instantly. John Slattery is the actor-turned- director who was Roger Sterling on that show, which he starred on (and directed episodes of) with Jon Hamm, who's the lead…Read More

Reality review — Verbatim leaker thriller has the goods

June 19, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Tina Satter | Written by Satter and James Paul Dallas, based on the play Is This A Room by Satter | 83 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Crave In June 2017, the Georgia suburban home of an American former US Air Force member and NSA translator named, believe it or not, Reality Winner (Sydney…Read More

Windfall review — Desert-set noir delivers lean, effective story

April 30, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Charlie McDowell | written by McDowell, Jason Segal and Justin Lader | 92 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Netflix Here’s a film from the director of The One I Love, an indie science fiction picture from a few years back that I really liked. Like the earlier picture this one's set in a luxurious…Read More

How To Blow Up A Pipeline review — Explosive political thriller leaves more questions than answers

April 17, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Daniel Goldhaber | Written by Goldhaber, Ariela Barer, and Jordan Sjol, based on the book by Andreas Malm | 103 min | ▲▲▲△△ A group of young and notably diverse environmental activists — who some would call terrorists — gather together in the Texas desert with enough explosives to disable key energy infrastructure.…Read More

Luther: The Fallen Sun review — Starts well, then crashes and burns

March 30, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Jamie Payne | Written by Neil Cross | 129 min | ▲▲△△△ | Netflix The only way to say the name of this movie's lead is, "LOOFAH", because that's how Idris Elba says it. I'm still scratching my head over that title. I faithfully watched the Luther series over its five seasons and very…Read More

Marlowe (2023) review — Liam Neeson’s softboiled noir

February 14, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Neil Jordan | Written by William Monahan, based on the novel by John Banville and the character created by Raymond Chandler | 110 min | ▲▲△△△ What we have here is a breathless effort to do a straight-ahead 1930s Hollywood private eye thriller, and a movie deeply indebted to the 1970s classic Chinatown —…Read More

Holy Spider review — Ruthless serial killer movie supersedes genre

January 13, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Ali Abbasi | Written by Abbasi and Afshin Kamran Bahrami | 116 min | ▲▲▲▲△ An earlier version of this review was posted from the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022. Holy Spider is a pitch-black serial killer thriller from the Swedish-Iranian director of 2018's fantasy love story, Border. This is a…Read More

The Pale Blue Eye review — Heart of gothic procedural tells a tale

January 5, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Scott Cooper | Written by Cooper, based on the novel by Louis Bayard | 128 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Netflix Scott Cooper is a director of gritty genre pictures. Some, like the western, Hostiles, deliver a potent brew of desperate characters in an unforgiving setting, while others, like the gangster drama Black Mass,…Read More

Top 10 New-To-Me Movies of 2022

December 18, 2022 flawintheiris

A few days ago on the hellscape we all know as Twitter, someone posted a list of the older films they'd discovered this year. Movies from the past they'd never had a chance to see before but had sought out or stumbled upon in the past 12 months and were glad they did. Since I'm…Read More

See How They Run review — It was Agatha all along

November 27, 2022 flawintheiris

Directed by Tom George | Written by Mark Chappell | 98 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Disney+ What we have here is an entirely self-aware, tongue-in-cheek, Agatha Christie-dragging whodunnit, stuffed with a delightful cast who completely understand what kind of movie they're in and swing for the fences. Accordingly, See How They Run is a delightful…Read More