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In 2015, Victor Zarcoff's 13 Cameras gave audiences chills with its story of a creepy landlord spying on a young couple through the use of hidden cameras. 14 Cameras is a sequel that tries to build on this idea, using the same villain but having him do everything on a larger scale, with more potential victims, more obvious nastiness and more explanation. As so often when films take this route, something is lost in the process.

In this film, Gerald (Neville Archambault) rents out a holiday home, using a picture of a blandly smiling young woman as cover. "She seems nice," one soon-to-be tenant says, though there's never any evidence that Gerald has the communication skills to impersonate a friendly person online, and we've all lived with the internet for a little too long now for anyone to put much trust in a picture alone. In fact, familiarity with the internet is a big problem for this film, which relies on its characters' naivety and also pitches the dark web as the source of ultimate evil without anything to tell us why that evil would be interested in Gerald's tenants and not preoccupied with all the other much more extreme material available out there. The one balancing factor here is that Gerald himself may be less in control of his online dealings than he thinks.

14 cameras is at its strongest when depicting the conflicts that Gerald's behaviour, which quickly extends to stealing from his tenants and messing with their stuff, provokes between them. There's the potential here for interesting character drama and although there are no standout performances the actors still succeed in creating tension. Archambault himself struggles to do so, his character having lost much of his initial impact due to being robbed of his mystery. ?14 Cameras?: Some Movies Are Just Bad 's now reduced to the status of an ugly person - with thinning hair, bad skin and hunched shoulders - preying on the supposedly beautiful out of bitterness or spite. Any more complex motive has been dropped in favour of more shambling, wheezing and general misfortune cast as repulsiveness - something that smarter horror films were challenging as far back as the Forties. It's lazy filmmaking and, more to the point, it robs the story of power.

Also missing here, to the film's detriment, is Zarcoff's directorial skill. Newcomers Seth Fuller and Scott Hussion just don't have the same ability to generate atmosphere. The sharp editing that's vital to success where multiple scenes are shot from static camera positions isn't there either. Towards the end, when we step outside the frame of the house and the action is captured more fluidly, the film starts to find its own visual voice, but by this point it has squandered most of its opportunities and has to build up again from scratch.

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I just saw this Chinese film called Animal World at AMC Grapevine Mills, and while it?s not much good as a movie, it poses a math problem that I can?t get out of my head. So I?m writing up this film (which just outearned the Jurassic World sequel at the Chinese box office) and hoping that someone with my fondness for such problems and a deeper background in game theory can break it down for me.

The movie starts like a whole other type of story, with Zheng Kaisi (Li Yifeng) a depressed young man working as a clown in a video arcade and imagining himself as some Joker-like superhuman battling monsters. This has no bearing on the rest of the film, and even more confusingly, is apparently not in the Japanese manga comic that this is based on. We get 20 minutes of a movie about some loser coping with his dead-end life by escaping into violent fantasy until his childhood friend Li Jun (Cao Bingkun) loses both their life savings by roping him into a real-estate scam that Kaisi should really be smart enough to avoid.

The math problem only starts when Kaisi is abducted by a mysterious American named Anderson (Michael Douglas) who owns his debt. He offers the young man a chance to clear his losses in one night by participating in a game, and soon Kaisi is on a seedy cargo ship with Li Jun and 101 other desperate men. The game is rock-paper-scissors, and each player starts the game with three metal stars affixed to an armband, as well as 12 playing cards marked with a symbol denoting rock, paper, or scissors (four of each). The players go to one of several dealer tables and play their cards one at a time against others. Win a hand, and you get to take one star from the other player. Lose, and be forced to surrender a star to your opponent. Draw, and no stars change hands. After each hand, the referees at the tables remove the cards from circulation. (The refs are all black men, for reasons that are never explained.) The object of the game is for players to play all 12 of their cards and emerge with at least three stars, the prize being freedom. A clock gives everyone four hours to play, and anyone with less than three stars or any cards left to play at the end of that time gets taken down to the ship?s hold to be subjected to horrible medical experiments. A big scoreboard shows not only the time left but also how many cards of each type remain in play on the gaming floor. A bank on the floor advances cash loans to players at absurdly high interest rates, and the players can use the money to buy stars or cards off other players. Sellers get to name their price, and those who finish the four hours with more than three stars can unload their extras for a mint to losing gamblers who want to stay alive.

Kaisi?s first strategy is the obvious one: Pair up with a buddy and arrange to have both players play the same cards in the same order, resulting in 12 draws and both players walking free. But since the players are mostly strangers to one another, it?s impossible to tell who to trust, and the guy Kaisi colludes with (Su Ke) cheats him out of two stars before he realizes it. (Oh, yeah: Players are allowed to cheat each other but not the house. One guy tries to flush his cards down the toilet, and Anderson executes him in the middle of the casino floor.) Kaisi then gathers with Li Jun and a sad sack with broken glasses (Wang Ge) to pool their stars and develop a winning strategy, made possible by their knowledge of which cards are left in the game. When paper cards starting running substantially lower than the other types, Kaisi tells his cohorts to buy up rock cards with their cash advance, figuring that those cards will either draw other rocks or beat the still-plentiful scissors cards. However, this tactic backfires when somebody picks up the strategy and starts hoarding papers, forcing Kaisi to reverse his direction before his rocks become worse than useless. Later, he faces down the guy who cheated him earlier, knowing that the man has one card that he must get rid of and trying to bait him into making a bad bet with it.

What else? The casino floor is monitored extensively by security cameras, and no physical violence is allowed, so taking someone else?s stars by force isn?t an option. Anderson?s game combines the bluffing elements of poker or the prisoner?s dilemma with the card-counting possibilities of blackjack, while rewarding those who know the laws of supply and demand. Animal World is dry and repetitive, but it got my gamer brain going. My question to you, gamers, is what would be the best strategy to beat Anderson at his game? How would https://ow.ly/MBvC101nKXh play?

The SuperFly remake is ghetto as fuck. How ghetto, you ask? Well, it came out on a Wednesday ? I didn?t think black movies did that anymore. Back in the Nineties, after movies like New Jack City and Boyz n the Hood saw their openings marred with shootings, studios began dropping ?urban films? midweek. That way, the suits must have figured, gun-toting black folk could have the multiplex all to themselves and not scare off white families on opening weekend. (Now, of course, it?s more likely that any violent ruckus during the feature presentation will come from an angry white dude with an AR-15.)

Anyway, Director X?s blinged-out redo of the 1972 blaxploitation classic has the same setup as the original: A suave drug dealer named Priest (played here by Trevor Jackson) hatches a plan to get out the dope game. And while some things have stayed the same ? Jackson?s hair is just as silky and permed-out as original Priest Ron O?Neal?s was ? some things have changed with the times. Instead of the mean, dirty streets of New York, the new SuperFly is set rather immaculately in Atlanta, where it looks as though it rains cash.

But this SuperFly ultimately owes more to stylized Nineties crime films like Carlito?s Way, Payback, and Belly. And while X may be more polished a director than the late Gordon Parks Jr. ? he sharpened his skills directing rap videos, back when he was known as Little X ? at least the original?s story was rooted in something authentic. In the first film, Priest wanted to get out of the life so desperately because everything was getting desperate around him. Between the corrupt cops who wanted a piece of his pie and the ass-out hoodlums ready to knock him out for his knot, a pimpalicious brotha in 1970s New York doesn?t have a chance.

This time, it just seems Priest wants to leave because he? https://null surrounded by greedy idiots. Priest?s chief rivals are the Snow Patrol, a goofy-ass gang that?s usually decked in all white (even their guns are pale). They?re doing quite well and have no beef with Priest, but still a young lieutenant (Kaalan Walker) wants to take down Priest and his empire because ? well, he?s just a hating brat.

Thanks to screenwriter Alex Tse (Watchmen), Priest appears to be the only character with any sense in his damn head. Right from Watch SuperFly 2018 opening scene, where Priest shakes down/humiliates a drug-dealing rapper and his crew, SuperFly establishes that no one can ever be as cunning and crafty as him. Unfortunately, this means the supporting characters are all one-note fools. From his trigger-happy right-hand man (Jason Mitchell) to his silent-but-deadly mentor (Michael K. Williams) to the tattooed detective (Jennifer Morrison, channeling Jennifer Jason Leigh) forcing Priest into a partnership to the lecherous mayor of the whole damn town (Antwan ?Big Boi? Patton, briefly hamming it up), they?re all so arrogant and swole-in-the-chest in their hunt for money and power that they?re really just incompetent babes in the woods.

For all its pulpy, genre-movie intentions, SuperFly is virtually crippled by its own ludicrousness. It incites more giggles than gasps. Even when it goes about Making a Statement by having a climactic showdown where Priest goes HAM on a crooked cop, practically making him a surrogate for all those who are tired of police brutalizing black people, it all comes off more as pandering than profound.

A very silly trip through a glamorous, ghetto gangland, SuperFly actually might make black people fire off some shots in movie theaters, but not for the reasons the executives fear ? out of anger of how damn ridiculous all this is.

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Our interesting new world of smaller film releases starring recognizable stars has most obviously benefited the action genre. Sure, there are tons of huge explosions out there on the big screen, but truly great action films lately have also been thriving on the DTV-streaming market. It never occurred to me this might also be the case with romantic comedies.

I?m not sure there was ever a time when Destination Wedding would have been a good fit for wide theatrical release. Were it to come out in the ?90s or something, so much would have to be added to it, easily enough to take away its unique charm and turn it into just another typical rom com. But since this doesn?t have to be some huge movie, Destination Wedding gets away being something rather special.

Winona Ryder plays Lindsey, and Keanu Reeves (along with his John Wick hair and beard) plays Frank. The two meet in an airport and hate each other immediately. Yet they keep getting stuck together. Between lobbing poisonous barbs at each other, they realize they are both going to the same wedding and will be stuck together for some time. They fall in love, duh.

That all sounds pretty cliche, but in Destination Wedding?s case, it?s not the song, it?s the singer. Writer-director Victor Levin isolates the moves of a romantic comedy and strips out absolutely everything else - up to and including cinematic language. The entire film is a series of two-shot conversations between Ryder and Reeves. There are other characters at this wedding, but not a single one of them gets a line. They are merely there as fodder for our leads to discuss. If the locations changes for each of these conversations weren? https://www.thanostv.org/movie/destination-wedding-2018 , this easily could have been a play.

And Levin commits to capturing it as a play. The dialog is quick and witty - if a little try-hard sometimes - and Levin makes sure it remains front and center throughout the film. Because there are so few cuts, we witness complete performances from Ryder and Reeves, which denies them the manufactured naturalism often granted by editing. It?s a bit awkward but also fascinating as it lays bare acting ticks that might otherwise go unnoticed. If you choose to watch this movie, do NOT make a drinking game out of how often you see Winona Ryder do her patented eye-roll with one eye half closed. You will die.

Letting that go, we?re left with chemistry working at its purest form. Courtship-by-fighting is a hard thing to get right. Destination Wedding succeeds thanks to its two leads and a neat trick in which their hatred for each other slowly transfers to unification as they wield that negativity toward everyone around them. Stuck together in a shitty situation with people they hate, the two become allies. Then they survive an encounter with a bobcat and have sex in the grass - talking the entire time, of course.

Destination Wedding forces us to hang with pretty miserable misanthropes as they drink, swear and have very awkward sex, but at its heart, it?s a somewhat chaste film, more adorable than biting. Rather than seem affected and reaching, this all adds to its charm. It?s like a weird fable but for grownups looking for something easy to watch that doesn?t make them feel too old or condescended to. It takes a minute to get on the film?s wavelength, but once you do it?s hard to dislike. In fact, the only thing I?m really bummed about is likely missing out on further movies exploiting Lindsey and Frank?s miserable romance as it moves through marriage and childbirth and all that. I would totally take a Before series about these two lovable assholes.

To continue reading the review and all of the highly detailed, scene-by-scene listings of the sex, nudity, profanity, violence and more (15 categories): or Just $7.95/month or $47/year I have subscribed to ScreenIt for more than a decade. I check in every week to take advantage of their amazing services. Not only does their site provide a glimpse of exactly what content a movie offers, I've found the ?Our Take? https://www.thanostv.org/movie/wish-upon-2017 and ratings for each movie to be right on the money every single time. I've referred dozens of friends to this service because my #1 resource for deciding whether or not to show a movie to my kids, or to see one myself, is ScreenIt.com! Josh Nisbet Director, State of CA Public Sector I signed up to get Screen It weekly reviews a long time ago, when my kids were young and I wanted to know more about movies before we went to a theater or rented. Now one child is in law school, other in undergraduate, and I still read the weekly Screen Its! It helps me know what my husband and I want to see or rent, and what to have waiting at home that we all will enjoy when my "kids" come home. I depend on Screen It reviews. They usually just present the facts and let me decide if the movie is appropriate or of interest for my family and me. Thank you for providing that service, Screen It! Patti Petree Winston Salem, NC I have 4 children who are now in college. I signed up for Screen It when my children were pre-teenagers. Often my children would ask to see a movie with a friend and I wished I could preview the movie prior to giving permission. A friend told me about ScreenIt.com and I found it to be the next best thing to previewing a movie. The amount of violence, sexual content, or language were always concerns for me and my husband as we raised innocent kids with morals. We constantly fought the peer pressure our kids received to see films that in our opinion were questionable. With the evidence we received at Screen It, our kids couldn't even fight us when we felt a film may have been inappropriate for them to watch. Thank you, Screen It. Continue to make this helpful service available to everyone, but especially the young parents. Christine Doherty Machesney Park, IL Screenit.com is an amazing resource for parents, educators, church groups or anyone who wants to make an informed decision whether a movie is suitable for their viewing. The reviews and content descriptions are so detailed I am mystified how the reviewers can put them together. Scott Heathe Vancouver, BC I love screen It! I don't know what I would do without it. It is well worth the membership. Before we take our son to the movies we check it out on screen it first. Thank you SO much for making it. Keep up the good work & keep 'em coming!!! Patrina Streety Moreno Valley California

The end result is too peculiar to just be dismissed as ?bad,? but I can?t imagine that Stone, Sadler, and Skarlatos?s acting careers have much of a future. watch the 15:17 to paris 2018 re-creates their courageous moment on that train, yes, but that sequence amounts to about 15 minutes of time in a movie that runs a roomy-feeling 95. So there are also a lot of less impressive re-creations: the three friends meeting in middle school, Stone taking tests to be in the military, and a solid chunk of scenes of them vacationing around Europe, taking selfies, and ordering beer at various restaurants.

The film has all the subtlety of a military-recruitment video. As kids, the trio love to play with toy guns and run around in the woods but struggle to conform to the rules of the strict Christian school they attend. As an adult, Stone lives a listless life until he decides to get in shape and apply to join the Air Force, prompting a long workout montage and a series of scenes detailing the tests one must pass to become a soldier. Skarlatos is also in the military, but Eastwood doesn?t delve as much into his upbringing, having clearly decided that Stone is the most intriguing member of the trio.

?You ever just feel like life is just pushing us towards something?? Stone asks Sadler as they look out on the Venice skyline. ?Like, some greater purpose?? Some of the details dropped into The 15:17 to Parisare meant to illuminate Stone?s crucial role in subduing the train shooter; there?s a reason viewers get that scene of him learning jiu-jitsu, say, or being taught how to apply pressure to a neck wound. Through it all, there are also frequent suggestions of a higher power guiding Stone toward something special?his mother (played by Judy Greer) is religious, and Skarlatos?s mom (played by Jenna Fischer) informs him that God has told her something very exciting will happen in his future.

But before all that action, there?s scene after stilted scene of the three buds hanging out and swapping canned bits of dialogue. As a director, Eastwood is renowned for shooting quickly and only doing one or two takes, an approach that feels borderline ruinous when the three stars of the film have never acted before. Other recent Eastwood efforts, like the excellent Sully, were helped by the magnetic movie stars at their center; The 15:17 to Parisunfortunately reminded me more of a school play or a workplace-safety video.

Then there?s the attack itself, where the camera is focused entirely on the actions of Stone, Skarlatos, and Sadler, who acted boldly and prevented tragedy. But the gunman, Ayoub El-Khazzani (Ray Corasani), is given nary a line; he is a faceless, meaningless villain, a problem to be solved and triumphed over. In the past, Eastwood has sought to understand the motivations on every side of a conflict (think of his wonderful film Letters From Iwo Jima, which focused on the Japanese side of the World War II battle), but he makes no such attempt here. Perhaps he deemed El-Khazzani?s alleged actions too monstrous to be worthy of examination.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. thanostv comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

The unspoken hope of attending a film festival like Sundance is that you could just stumble upon some small, incredibly effective film that might otherwise have never crossed your radar. That?s precisely the case with The Guilty,an engrossing Danish thriller from first-time feature director Gustav M�ller that?s playing in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition category.

The story of an emergency dispatcher who?s suddenly caught up in trying to solve a kidnapping from behind his desk, the movie takes place entirely in real time, and is set in just two tiny rooms. In less assured hands, that could end up playing like a gimmick or cheap gag, but thanks to M�ller?s staging, a script full of twists, and a compelling performance from lead actor Jakob Cedergren, it?s a riveting, nerve-racking surprise ? and it has a few things to say about how even the best intentions can lead to disturbing abuses of power.

It?s a minimalist thriller, using Cedergren?s performance, sound design, and some great vocal performances from the supporting cast to craft a movie that feels like much more than the sum of its parts.

Police officer Asger Holm (Cedergren) has been demoted to desk work after some initially unexplained incident. He?s been working as an emergency phone dispatcher for Denmark?s version of 911, and as the movie opens, he?s wrapping up his last day on the job. Tomorrow he?ll face an inquiry about the mysterious incident, after which he expects to be back on the street with his partner.

Then Holm takes a call from a frightened woman named Iben (Jessica Dinnage, conveying an impressive array of emotion with just her voice), who says she?s been kidnapped, and is being driven by her captor to some unknown location. Holm scrambles, trying to help a police car pull over the van Iben is in before things can go too far. Then the call drops. Unable to get hold of Iben again, he instead tracks down the woman?s 6-year-old daughter, who tells him her father was the kidnapper. With nothing but a phone and computer at his disposal, Holm becomes a man obsessed, determined to rescue Iben.

It?s about the way we perceive the world around us ? not in an objective, fair way, but in a way guided by our own biases, and our need to have purpose in the world. From the beginning of the film, Holm feels frustrated and demoralized by being stuck behind a desk, but then he gets the call from Iben. It instantly gives him a crime to solve, and a way to prove to himself that he?s still able to do some good in the world.

The film does its cleverest and most insidious work when it?s playing with that last idea. Holm sees the outlines of the case that he wants to see ? one that gives him the opportunity to be a certain kind of hero ? which leads him to make some tragic assumptions and miscalculations. The way he uses his authority to intervene ends up crossing moral boundaries. The Guilty ends up exploring intriguing, timely ideas about how the power handed to people like law enforcement officers can lead to hubris, arrogance, and violence.

The single-location thriller conceit can often end up playing like a low-budget gimmick rather than a creative choice, but M�ller uses it to create a film that feels taut and claustrophobic. It also never looks cheap. The screenplay, which the director wrote with collaborator Emil Nygaard Albertsen, is full of genuinely surprising twists, along with the ones audiences may see coming. But it is able to use the sparse phone calls Holm has with Iben, the other dispatchers, and Holm?s own partner to create a fully realized world. The camera doesn?t leave the two rooms where Holm makes his phone calls, but the characters are so cleanly drawn, and their interactions are so authentic, that it?s easy to picture the outside world with full clarity.

While M�ller is able to lend some surprising visual variety to what should be a staid, generic location, the performances ultimately carry the movie. Dinnage stands out as Iben, but this is unquestionably Jakob Cedergren?s film. The actor?s slow-motion meltdown as Holm tries to rescue Iben ? all with the increasing pressure of the inquiry the following day bearing down on him ? is striking to behold. It?s rare that an actor is given an opportunity to so completely dominate a film, and Cedergren takes advantage, turning every moment and glare into an opportunity for the audience to see how Holm is falling apart.

PG-13. There?s some minor profanity, and at various points characters talk about some horrifying things, but the movie is just a guy talking on the phone. How many problems could the MPAA really have with that?

The Guiltydoesn?t have U.S. distribution set up yet, but this is the kind of movie that Amazon or Netflix should snatch up immediately. It?s a perfect fit for a streaming service ? though it?s just as easy to imagine an English-language remake coming along soon.

You can?t blame genre directors for trying to mix things up now and then, experiment with a new approach, see where it goes. Unfortunately, for this viewer, the formal constraint foisted upon him by writer/director Jeremy Rush in ?Wheelman? went right up his nose and stayed there, resulting in a little less than 90 minutes of annoyance.

The bare bones of the storyline are familiar. https://www.thanostv.org/movie/wheelman-2017 plays the title wheelman, a reluctant criminal (aren?t they all) working a bank robbery against his better judgment. What can he tell you? He?s less than a year out of prison, he owes money, and he has a beloved daughter who he?s trying to provide for and raise right, and an irritated ex-wife who is ever one court judgment away from getting permanent custody of said daughter.

So, of course, the job he?s working on is going to go very sour. Not that the wheelman initially makes life easy for himself. Driving the wet nighttime streets, he looks terribly confident and competent, and when he picks up the two bank robbers, he very aggressively high-hats them, refusing to give them a name and snootily telling them that he?s not here for small talk. No, he?s here to be a good dad, as his cell-phone conversations with his rebellious teenage daughter Katie tell us. I don?t trust crime movies in which the lead character has some sort of fixation with being Father of the Year, but that turns out to be hardly the biggest problem here.

No, the biggest problem is the aforementioned formal constraint that writer-director Rush sets up. Deriving inspiration (I presume) from the 2013 Tom-Hardy-starring drama ?Locke,? this is a getaway car chase movie that aspires to remain entirely within the car. (Actually, within two cars, but let?s not get ahead of ourselves.) After the first snafu, in which Grillo?s wheelman leaves behind the robbers (this may be a silly question but given the fact that this movie is entirely night-set, I had to wonder why the bank they knocked over was open so late), he is obliged to play cat and mouse with a variety of unknown-number phone callers, all of whom are abusive and make terrible demands of him. They also all sound as if they?ve been doing ?Goodfellas? karaoke.

For what seems like hours, these various characters exchange ?Who are you?s, ?where are you?s, ?where?s my money?s, ?fk you?s, ?fk you motherf**er?s, and so on. Mr. Rush doesn?t seem to grasp that one reason ?Locke ?worked was that even though it stuck with one man in one car talking to a variety of people, those people were articulately voiced. More than that, they were brilliantly acted; one of the characters was played by Olivia Colman. And the movie?s writer/director Edward Knight had crafted a multi-leveled, suspenseful storyline to be talked through.

Also, having set up this formal constraint, Rush can?t even stick with it. The wheelman has to have a sit down with his initial contractor, a guy named Clay. So, he pulls up to the bar where Clay is at, and the camera sits in the car, waits, and captures the wheelman dragging Clay (Garrett Dillahunt) into the car, so they can talk. At this point, classic film lovers will know what I mean when I say, ??Gun Crazy? this is not.?

Your mileage may vary, particularly if you?re a fan of lead actor Grillo, whose work in a couple of Marvel pictures has earned him one of those cult followings you could call ?ancillary,? no offense to Mr. Grillo. But whatever ?Wheelman? does, it won?t propel him to anything beyond that status.