Movie Review: The Drop (2014)

by Tony Dayoub


Michaël R. Roskam's The Drop doesn't exactly venture into new territory. Its story places two small-scale hustlers, Bob Saginowski (Tom Hardy) and his cousin, known to all as Cousin Marv (James Gandolfini), at the center of a treacherous and complicated scheme right out of Noir 101. Now owned by Chechen mobsters, the eponymous Cousin Marv's Bar is robbed by two dim assailants on the night it happens to be the assigned drop bar receiving all of the Chechens' protection money collected at other bars. This instantly puts Bob and Cousin Marv in hot water with the bar's deadly owners who suspect an inside job. Though the robbers were masked, Bob notices a curious detail: one of the thieves was wearing a stopped watch. Mentioning it to lead investigator Detective Torres (John Ortiz) inexplicably raises Cousin Marv's ire and sets him against his soft-spoken relative.

UPDATED: NYFF50 Review: Passion (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

Twenty years since their last collaboration, director Brian De Palma and composer Pino Donaggio reunite in their latest work, Passion. The reunion both recalls the virtuosic filmmaker's best period—the late 70s/early 80s—and revitalizes the career of a master, whose recent filmography's quality has been spotty at best. Redacted (2007) was an interesting experiment in utilizing found footage to tell a story about the Iraq war that collapsed under the weight of its propaganda-like liberal agenda (and I say this as someone who leans considerably to the left). And the postwar neo-noir, The Black Dahlia (2006), should have been a slam dunk for a director who's always shown an ease for crime stories, but instead, it felt oddly inept at delivering its admittedly sprawling, complicated plot. Not since 2002's Femme Fatale has De Palma manipulated his audience so boldly or so wittily as he does with Passion.

Prometheus (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

Who would have thought that Prometheus, Ridley Scott's triumphant return to science fiction, is not necessarily designed to evoke the picture it shares the most connective tissue with? 1979's Alien, only Scott's second film, was a horrific variation on the traditional haunted house movie trope in which a small crew of seven miners slowly gets picked off by an indestructible monster in the outer reaches of space. Alien's grungy, shopworn technology, its motley crew of unlikeable and all too human antiheroes, and the emergence of the spaceship Nostromo's whiny, female second officer as the film's lead were among the movie's innovative twists, spicing up a once moribund genre. Eventually, Alien inspired so many copycats it all seemed kind of old hat again. While ostensibly a tangential prequel—explaining a few of the more mysterious elements of Alien—Prometheus takes off on a different course, one especially familiar to those of us around in the '70s.

Movie Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009)

by Tony Dayoub

Last time we saw her, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) had uncovered a conspiracy involving men at the highest level of her government, all protecting her cruel Soviet father, Alexander Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov), who Lisbeth had once torched in retaliation for beating her mother. Salander had penetrated this veil of secrecy with her super-computer-hacking powers, ass-kicking prowess, and a little help from Millennium Magazine reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist). But the final confrontation between Salander and Zalachenko—a clean-up man for the shadowy organization behind the movie's conspiracies—left both of them bloodied, broken, and near death, while Zalachenko's near-invulnerable enforcer—and Salander's half-brother—the giant Niedermann, had disappeared. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest continues from this point.

Movie Review: The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009)

by Tony Dayoub

This time it's personal.

During the mid-eighties, at the height of the suspense genre in America, when audiences would develop an attachment to a star like Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson over a span of several movies in some series of crime thrillers, this seemingly ubiquitous tag line usually resided somewhere on the poster for the sequel, implying we were going to find out more about our hero's background in the sophomore movie since we enjoyed the character so much in the first. The truth is I can only find one real reference to this tag line in cinema, and that is for the fourth entry in the Jaws series, Jaws: The Revenge (but it felt widespread enough that Back to the Future Part II makes a small joke about it with a Jaws 19 poster that reads "This time it's really really personal"). A sequel starring large-scale central characters inevitably turns inward to examine its own protagonists, let the audience know what makes them tick. So it's not unexpected that The Girl Who Played with Fire would follow suit, justifying the use of such a tag line by turning its focus on the enigmatic Lisbeth Salander. The second part in this Swedish suspense trilogy digs deeper into the pierced, emo-looking, kickboxing, computer-hacking basket case so intriguingly played by Noomi Rapace in the earlier The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009). But does it find anything there to sustain our interest?

Catching Up at the Movies

by Tony Dayoub

I've been a bit remiss in writing about some of the theatrical releases I've seen, but given the overall quality of mainstream cinema this summer that's to be expected. Between all of the 3D fluff, "pre-sold property" dreck, and mediocre indies, there just hasn't been much worth writing about at the cinema (this weekend yields more promising movies here in Atlanta). But if only to share, here are some capsule reviews for a mixed bag of movies... and a small tribute, after the jump.