The View From The Mountain

Director Ben Wheatley is so far known for Kill List , High Rise , and Sightseers , as well as a load of television work (including two episodes of Doctor Who ). His latest is Free Fire , a pretty simple story about a gun deal between two gangs that goes horribly wrong in an abandoned factory in Boston back in 1978. Cillian Murphy ( Dunkirk , Peaky Blinders ) stars as the buyer of the guns, a shipment of M-16s that he hopes to deliver to his countrymen back home in Northern Ireland for use against the British. But the seller, Vernon, a wily South African perfectly played to the wild-eyed hilt by Sharlto Copley ( District Nine , The A-Team ), delivers a set of completely different machine guns. While not happy, Murphy’s character buys the guns, after trying one of them out right in the abandoned factory (a well-done set that Wheatley actually designed while using the Minecraft video game). But just when it looks like a potential problem may have been averted, two of the men from each o...

During the height of the summer movie season, the theaters become inundated with the big dopey popcorn movie with the formula plot, plenty of explosions and rapid fire film editing that’s designed (not created--there’s no creativity to speak of, here) to keep the attention of the audience from wandering off the screen. For the most part these movies are completely forgettable, usually slipping from the minds of the audience once they leave the theater and start making plans to get something to eat. But there was one film this summer that was anything but a ’by the numbers’, carefully designed blockbuster. War for the Planet of the Apes --the third film in the rebooted Ape trilogy that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes , and continued with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes --had also been released this summer, and the movie season is all the better for it. Directed by Matt Reeves, who also directed Dawn , War for the Planet of the Apes finally brings the epic war between Ape and ...

Spider-Man: Homecoming is the sixth Spider-Man film in less than twenty years, starring the third actor (Tom Holland) to play the superhero. Thanks to a new deal between Marvel and Sony (the studio that owns the cinematic rights to the Web Spinner) Spider-Man can now appear in such super fantabulous movies like Captain America: Civil War , and the upcoming Avengers sequels, Avengers 3: Where Are Those Infinity Stones, Already? and Avengers 4: Get The Hell Off My Lawn. While I admit that I was getting to the point of being Spider-Manned out, I have to say that I really liked Tom Holland’s introduction as the Wall Crawler in CA: Civil War . The original Spider-Man, created in the comics by artist Steve Ditko and writer Stan Lee, was just a high school kid who was struggling to balance being a superhero and getting his homework done on time. Tom Holland perfectly imbued his Peter Parker/Spider-Man with that same youthful vigor--being all ‘golly gee-whiz’ at the fact that he was helpin...

Although I had seen Alien Covenant more than a month ago, around when it first came out, I could not review it because--technically--I didn’t really see it, thanks to some loud jackasses who thought the general rule of being quiet in the theater while the movie was playing didn’t apply to them. The nonstop chattering started during the opening scene where a newly “born” David (Michael Fassbender) is speaking with his creator Peter Weyland (an uncredited Guy Pearce). This opening scene may not make much sense at first, but the reason why it’s included snaps into sharp focus the deeper you get into Alien: Covenant , which is very much a sequel to Prometheus (and is all the better for it). But, being the overexcited screech-weasels my fellow movie watchers were, once the chattering began it just got worse, with people speaking loudly to each other or into their cell phones, as if they were anywhere else but a movie theater. Leaving midway through the film, I managed to impress upon the...