The Game (1997)

David Fincher’s red-herring thriller “The Game” failed with most mainstream critics. I loved it. I just saw a different movie. “Game” is a deceitful movie about the deceit of movie-making, the Hollywood button-pushing that we know is fiction, but that we get sucked up into: Drama, action, comedy. The edits, camera angles, lights, sound effects: We know it’s fake, but we buy in bulk. We get involved. The plot: Michael Douglas is soul-dead San Fran multimillionaire Nicholas Van Orton who accepts a “gift” from his baby brother (Sean Penn), a vacation that comes to him at home and office, a personalized attack that crushes and removes every instinct Nic has built, bought, and forged, starting with a TV with its own mind and running past a crashed cab in deep water. The plot is preposterous, of course, but it’s on purposefully so, this beautiful nasty meta-film of a film stars a man who has bought into his own Hollywood thriller by choice, we the audience running with him. By choice. Douglas -– the symbol of amoral America during the 1980s –– is perfectly cast as a vastly unlikable man who we root for quickly. We are him. A

Trance (2013)

Gotchya films that spin on corkscrew narratives –- “Manchurian Candidate” is my favorite -– succeed only if we care about the characters and only if we dig the deep pit the screenwriters have tossed them into. Danny Boyle’s “Trance” is all crazy turns, pulled rugs, blown loyalties, and bad guys still gabbing after their skull has been shot off. The shocks and surprises hit so often and so outlandishly OTT, it passes suspense and becomes a comedic parade of drunken one-uppers. Numbness sets in. James McAvoy works at an auction house that falls prey to a heist just as a Renoir goes to sale. The work is seemingly lost and our hero is cracked on the skull, leading to memory loss. The heist master (Seymor Cassell) won’t have that and when torture fails, he hires a hypnotist (Rosario Dawson) to peer inside McAvoy’s brain. So to speak. The headachy flash edits are frantic and too hip. The flat characters don’t help. I really could have lived without ever hearing surround sound of vaginal hair being shaved. Boyle, it appears, could not. And if you can get past the firestorm finale without laughing to excess, I salute you. C

Closed Circuit (2013)

The successful conspiracy flick rests on the audience unsure of who to trust or how deep the conspirators –- be they Big Brother or Big Corp. -– lay buried. Endings are key. From “Conversation” to “Most Wanted Man,” if I’m not shaken paranoid, then what’s the point? There’s none in “Closed Circuit,” a meek flick about London spies putting two attorneys (Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall) through hell as they represent the Muslim suspect of a shop bombing. Upfront: The villains are ploddingly obvious, with Jim Broadbent all ham as a John Mitchell type with an ugly beard, and another Famous Name as a mentor who -– of course -– turns traitor. Zero suspense. And that’s surprising as Stephen Knight (“Dirty Pretty Things”) wrote the screenplay. I wanted a dark tale that left me breathless, but when our heroes meet in secret at a football match, surrounded by cameras, I was laughing. More so, the heroes are dumb. Who doesn’t question the sudden suicide of a pal working on a top secret case? No one here has seen a movie. And that’s the problem, the likely studio-mandated fix-it ender is so happy, it feels like every movie we’ve seen. C-

Suspicion (1941)

Subpar Alfred Hitchock still outpaces 90 percent of anything made in Hollywood 70 years ago or now. But romance-thriller “Suspicion” is a stiff. I swear Hitchcock was bored making it, because I was bored watching it, and that’s a tall order since “Suspicion” stars Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine. Apologies to the master and stars. History says morality-cop conservative censors –- Hays Code –- killed this tale before film was set to camera. I believe it. Plot: Wealthy gal Fontaine falls in love with wealthy party boy lothario (Grant) who turns out not to be rich, but a gambling, lying, thieving heel who gets away with such deeds because he’s Cary fuckin’ Grant. When hubby’s best pal –- who is wealthy -- eventually (a long eventually) turns up dead, wifey fears for her own life. Cue scariest glass of milk ever. Cue ... nothing happens. Look, some scenes rock -- that glowing milk, the play of shadows as a bird cage -- but this is a slog, and a sexist drudge as it plasters a heroine who must learn to keep her trap shut and not doubt her crap-o hubs. Because he’s Cary Grant. B-

Stoker (2013)

Director Park Chan-wook (2003’s “Oldboy”) makes his American debut with “Stoker,” a gorgeous, nasty domestic drama turned serial killer thriller that takes Hitchock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” and cranks up the violence and perversion to skin-crawling affect. As with the 1943 classic tale, a girl (Mia Wasikowska) suspects her romantic/handsome/suave Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) of murderous deeds after her father mysteriously dies and the uncle -– father’s brother -– moves into to help comfort the mother (Nicole Kidman). The line “We don’t have to be friends, we’re family,” sums up the story: There is no love here. This familial lot is as creepy and somber as the house they reside in. That is a double edged sword. Park and writer (and openly gay actor) Wentmorth Miller start in crazy town and stay, banging you in the head with a frying pan from frame one. Hitchcock served a fine dinner first, then took to swinging. Such is life. Hitchcock would dig the dark path of our central heroine. Wasikowska (“Alice in Wonderland”) owns the film, against the cool Goode and Kidman, who cooks up an acting storm from a role blankly stamped “frigid.” Watch it twice. Squirm. B+

Sisters (1973)

During the finale of Brian De Palma’s “Sisters,” a bloody schizoid mind fuck love letter to Hitchcock, my jaw hung open. This riffs on Siamese sisters -- one alive, the other not quite, and both played by Margot Kidder –- and doesn’t just drive off the cliff. It launches off the road at rocket speed and explodes in a splatter of gore and brain pulp. We follow, as with any good Hitchcock film, a guy (Lisle Wilson) and a gal (Kidder) attracted to each other after a bizarre appearance on a TV game show that has unsuspecting men watching woman strip bare, with the latter in on the gag. The couple’s date goes bad fast: Her ex-husband (William Finley) prowls crazy and stalks the couple to her apartment, where things get icky and –- no spoiler –- bloody. De Palma then switches gears to a writer (Jennifer Salt) who sees the crazy deeds, before slamming back into drive, then reverse, then circles, burning out the engine for a finale that hit me far different than any plot synopsis I read. I loved every whacked red-soaked second. I still don’t know how to grasp it all, but obsess nonetheless. That’s addictive filmmaking. A 

Alex Cross (2012)

Halfway through watching a shocking dull and vacant Tyler Perry sleepwalk his way through playing James Patterson’s famed detective “Alex Cross,” the actor who should be playing the role arrives for a cameo that kills. Giancarlo Esposito. You know his face. “Breaking Bad.” “Usual Suspects.” He scorches screen as a mob boss called on by Cross as the stalwart detective sinks to “Untouchables” methods to bag the psychotic assassin/kick boxer/artist (!!) who killed his wife. That’s the main plot, set up by a starved-looking Matthew Fox (“Lost”) as the thrice-talented loon slow-tortures and kills a woman and then goes gonzo across Detroit in a mysterious spree that leads to a massively unsurprising conspiracy of typical James Patterson pedigree. But forget the forgettable plot. Back to Perry. Love or hate his “Madea” films, he is undeniably entertaining, and can own a screen. Here, he’s outclassed by furniture. A stiff on moving legs, sans zombie makeup. Is he tired? Put off by the rough (but PG-13) material laid out by director Rob Cohen? I have no idea. “Cross” opens DOA, and save Esposito’s blip, stays a flatliner. D

Rebecca (1940)

Alfred Hitchcock’s American debut “Rebecca” – based on a bestseller – defines what old timers (and us TCM fanatics) mean with “They don’t make them like they used to.” Four years older than my father, this gorgeously shot black-and-white thriller sucks you in to its tale of romance as a woman (Joan Fontaine) falls for a widower (Laurence Oliver). The man is, of course, crazy wealthy, owning a castle named Manderley, and crazy, haunted by wife No. 1. In what I gather is a sick-twist Hitchcock joke, an old bird (Florence Bates) tells our heroine that Manderley will eat her alive. She’s right. Our nameless heroine is smothered by the stone walls and wealth, the “ghost” of Rebecca, the wife who drowned mysteriously and questionably, and the black-oil stare of the watchful housekeeper (Judith Anderson), who defines wicked. Secrets boil over as our heroine sinks into a mess, her ramrod morality straining against fates I still awe at, second watching. This is exceptional filmmaking, smooth, and with as much dark humor as betrayals, our director taking us innocents for a ride. The cast is flawless, the film endlessly re-watchable. A+

Side Effects (2013)

Steven Soderbergh’s (apparent) final big-screen bow takes on big pharma and the need for Americans to dope up to get through the day, be it anti-depressants, anxiety pills, uppers, downers, or whatever. And what of the “Side Effects”? Limp libido? Exhaustion? Murderous sleep-walking fit? That’s the ticket here as a married couple (Channing Tatum and Rooney Mara) rocked by hubby’s prison stint for Wall Street sins are reunited only to see the wife slip off her plates after an apparent suicide attempt. Caught in the middle of all this, taking money from on high and prescribing pills to the low, is Jude Law as a psychiatrist, who begins Boy Scout and becomes … less so. I can’t give away anything more, because Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (both of “Contagion”) take a turn that hit me, well, like a drug at first -- euphoric love, but then a quick and lowly crash as I contemplated all that I saw. How not to spill the pills? Let me say this: The ugly ridiculous denouncement is Family Research Council approved. Pure 1950s. Got it? Mara is great. Tatum, ehh. Catherine Zeta-Jones plays another head shrink, and Pacinos the scenery. B- 

X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008)

I watched the supernatural “X-Files” TV series with so-so religious devotion, and the 1998 “X-Files: Fight the Future” film was well-timed, bringing back paranormal FBI agent investigators Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson). Yet, by the time “X-Files: I Want to Believe” came 10 years later, I was over the show. So seem the actors and creator/director Chris Carter. This is a “stand-alone” episode, not just in theme, but time. It’s more akin to “Se7en.” Not anything to obsess over. Here, Scully works miserably at a Catholic hospital, while Mulder clips news articles and miserably grows a beard. A perplexing case involving a missing FBI agent, a severed arm, and a psychic criminal priest (Billy Connolly) brings our heroes back to flashlights in the dark and grisly conspiracies, and as the mystery is uncovered, the limits of PG-13 ratings are stretched as is any semblance of logic: A hero hears dogs barking in No Where West Virginia and instantly recognizes the bad guy’s lair. Really? No one here has been to West Virginia, the snow screams Canada. Believe? My faith vanished long ago. C+

Deadfall (2012)

“Deadfall” is a snowy thriller more generic than its title. Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde crack the plot open as Alabama sibling thieves gunning for Canada because all criminals adore good ol’ Canada.

Plans go bad. The couple crashes their ride in wintry Michigan, kill a cop, and split ways, but not before bro eyes sis’s ass. She likes it. Ick. Brother kills a Native American, loses a finger, saves a woman and child from a bad dad, and has a shootout with police. Sister hooks up with an Olympic ex-con (Charlie Hunnam) on the run to his parents (Sissy Spacek and Kris Kristofferson) for Thanksgiving. 

Stick a pack of monks in a room and they’ll guess how this drama -– from Oscar-winning director Stefan Ruzowitzky (“Counterfeiters”) -– will end: Buckets of blood and trite family confessions over turkey. 

Character arcs roam random, but not more than Bana’s accent which starts Forrest Gump goober veers Australian and ends bland American. 

Worst crime: Casting Kate Mara (“127 Hours”) as a deputy marginalized as a useless girl dolt by her sexist peers, then writing her character off as a useless girl dolt. Awful. D

Red Lights (2012)

There’s gotta be a porn film with this title, “Red Lights.” But this isn’t that kind of film. We’re talking psychics here, supernatural, reality, and con jobs. Sigourney Weaver plays a brilliant but (naturally) under-funded university researcher of the paranormal who has spent her career unmasking psychics as frauds. Her assistant researcher and driver is a brilliant geek named Tom (Cillian Murphy, taking a break from “Batman” movies). The duo gets antsy when a blind psychic (Robert De Niro) turns up after a 30-year absence, ready to go public again. When Weaver’s character suddenly dies, Tom goes off the deep end of obsession to crush De Niro’s charmer. Writer/director Rodrigo Cortes (“Buried”) spins a creepy and interesting tale for a while, but as the thriller lurches on, it becomes a comedy soup. Tom getting into a shoving match with another professor (Toby Jones) had me giggling hard. I fell for red herrings I created entirely in my own mind. Score for Cortes. The final scenes, though, are so bug-fuck crazy stupid (I won’t spoil) that I tuned out, again laughing myself silly. I wonder if Cortes saw that coming? C+

Vanishing on 7th Street (2011)

Hayden Christensen is on the run in the horror/thriller “Vanishing on 7^th Street.” He runs not from cops or crooks, nor space aliens. He runs from a dark cloud that vaporizes all life that it touches. George Lucas with more “Star Wars” prequel ideas? No. More biblical plaque a la “Exodus.” The Roanoke (N.C.) mystery plays a hand. No matter, director Brad Anderson (“Casper”) never tells us. We’re in Detroit at night when thousands of people disappear during a power outage. Only a tiny handful remain: Christensen’s TV news reporter and some stragglers (Thandie Newton and John Leguizamo) and a child. They bicker, fret, and flee the dark. God is invoked, but the majority of plot is set inside a bar. A church sits down the street. The mystery is a doubled-edged sword that leads to a WTF ending with plot holes wide open: The city falls into absolute blot-out-the-sun dark, but the moon shines bright. How? In horror, details matter. Christensen plays well against an endless void. It’s all uphill after Teen Vadar. B-

Arbitrage (2012)

Richard Gere is never bolder/better than when he plays an amoral cockup with sins to hide and a clock to beat. He is that and more in “Arbitage,” a timely thriller with Gere as a billionaire hedge fund manager who in one week sees a longtime financial fraud shell game crumble and accidentally kills his mistress in a crash, all while dodging police and his suspecting wife (Susan Sarandon). This is a 1 percenter who has been thieving and lying so long, the light of truth gets him sweating. But he knows the rigged system. That’s the twist in this ethics quagmire: We see-saw between wanting this pig nailed and wanting him to escape unharmed. Writer/director Nicholas Jarecki also takes an open shot at the real “takers” in this land –- not the poor or African-Americans or Hispanics as Fox News preaches, but the rich white Wall Street elite who own the banks. The scene where Gere’s CEO cluelessly asks a young black man who he has drawn into his scheme, “What’s an Applebee’s?” (The man wants to open a franchise), exemplifies modern American values. Money is all. A-

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

John Carpenter’s cult-classic, >$100,000-budget action thriller “Assault of Precinct 13” is the parent to all “siege” movies that would come a decade later, including “Die Hard.” Itself a modern re-make of “Alamo”-type flicks, this also was to be set in the West, but Carpenter could not swing the budget. The bare plot: A mysterious pack of gang members attack a L.A. ghetto police station on the eve of its closure, trapping a stalwart African-American officer (Austin Stoker), several women, and convicted felons (including Darwin Joston) inside. “Assault” is a midnight feature that can play as a maybe-zombie film -– the gang members dabble with bowls of blood and are all but suicidal. Deep-thoughts: It’s a post-Vietnam American meltdown, or a satire on 1950s films that celebrated white heroics and all but demeaned blacks, flipped on its, middle finger held out proud. But the heck with deep anything, this is a blazin’ cool cheap “B” flick that excels its origins and is seriously nasty fun. The title, by the way, is infamously wrong. The besieged station is District 13, Precinct 9. “Assault of Precinct 9”? Hmmm. Na. “13.” B+

End of Watch (2012)

A heap of movie critics (even Ebert) are throwing praise on “End of Watch” -– a visceral, bloody, gut-punch police drama/thriller than goes against the endless grain of cops as corrupt, greedy, psychotic thugs -- as one of the best films of the year. It could have been. Damn it comes close, often with pitch-perfect dialogue, and harshly with haunting violence. But gimmicks from 1999 abound with shaky-cam overload -- times 10.

Dig it James Ellroy style: Jake Gyllenhaal gives his career-best showing (and he’s been good for years, especially in “Jarhead”) as Brian Taylor, a veteran Marine now working a black-and-white on Los Angeles’ toughest streets, South Central, a land of shit streets, crap homes, and closed businesses plagued by poverty, drugs, guns, and the growing power of Mexican drug cartels that know no border. It’s a near Third World, except the bad guys carry gold-plated AK-47s in some sick “Scarface” fantasy world come true. 

Taylor’s partner is Mike Zavala, a Hispanic-American with a wife and 3.5 children, played by Michael Pena. The men are brothers. Not by blood. But the job. Each will take a bullet or more for one another. No questions asked. The men bullshit banter in the squad car in the best movie back-and-forth since “Pulp Fiction,” but when the hammer drops, they are stone silent and careful, especially when they stumble upon a massive crime spree of human-trafficking and other horrors all right under their noses. They also “fight” the “parents,” that is, the Sarge and all the powers-that-be at work, but playfully. Zavala is the settled one, smart and cautious, Taylor is gung-ho and first out of the car.

The film, written and directed by David Ayer (he wrote Training Day”) drops us in this L.A. Story with no escape, and he shows the ugliest scenes –- ghastly murders, grpahic assaults, endless deaths, and child abuse -– with no let up. The settings never smack of a film set, or some obvious stand-in. I have never been to South Central L.A., but this feels real, down to the litter and alleys and bars on house windows. 

But damn it, where Ayer goes maddeningly wrong is in a ridiculous decade-old plot contrivance that has Taylor touting around digital cameras 24/7 to film his life on the job for an art class. (We never see the guy in class, despite his wanting to earn a law degree.) For all the on-the-street realism Ayers constantly pushes, I call “bullshit” on any relatively intelligent officer anywhere in the world, much less South Central L.A., that would enter potential hot spots and crime scenes carrying a freakin’ camera in one mitt and one-handing his side arm in the other. Especially for a Marine such as Taylor. 

Even what little I know as an ex-crime reporter, when entering an unknown location, searching room by room, any police officer keeps his hands, both hands, on his or her weapon because that weapon will save his or her life. Nothing. Else. Matters. Disagree? Ask a cop. Ask a soldier, for that matter. (If your partner chooses a Sony over a Glock, seriously, trade the hell up.) Call it a movie, sure. I get it, fantasy. But, guess what? The soulless gang members also happen to carry around cameras to share their exploits. For art class, too? YouTube? All this “Blair Witch” shaky-cam crap is mixed in with normal cinema capture, from the sky, floor, whatever, after Taylor’s camera is down. 

I dig and appreciate Ayer’s attempts at showing what policemen and women face each day, the gallows humor they (absolutely true) employ to stay sane, and a refusal to show every cop as worse than the bad guys (I’m look at you “Freelancers” and “Safe” and 1,005 other films), but he should have stuffed the gimmicks and played the film straight. This seriously could have been well atop my Top 10 List of the year. But for the gimmicks.

 God bless Pena. A consistently great actor in “Crash” and “The Lincoln Lawyer” and a few dozen other films, he gives an amazingly tough, smart, funny, and humane performance here. His officer is a full human being, jumping off the page. Watch his horrified silent reaction as he comes across a squalid dungeon full of Mexicans held as drug-runner slaves, and, damn, the man deserves an Oscar nomination. And leading man status on par with Gyllenhaal and any other actor out there. B

Exam (2010)

Eight adults sit at desks in a small, gray, cube-like room and for 80 minutes must battle with wits and then more physicals means for a job at a mysterious bio-tech company in “Exam.” Very independent and consistently smart, “Exam” was co-written and directed by Brit Stuart Hazeldine and feels like an off-off-Broadway play as the film never leaves its one room. An unnamed man (Colin Salmon) lays out the task: “There is only one question,” and the recruits must figure out what it is. The last man or woman standing gets the job. It’s not just any job, either, as the firm likely has a cure for a virus that has rocked England to its knees. Among the recruits –- all named for their ethnicity or hair color -– is narcissistic White (Luke Mably), devoted Christian Black (Chuk Iwuji), ex-Special Forces loon Brown (Jimi Mistry), and head-shrinker Dark (Adar Beck). Reaching the One Question pull up dozens: Who among the eight is a plant, has the virus, or is desperate enough to kill? Taunt and exciting, “Exam” ingeniously turns Gen-Y yuppies into biblical savages, fighting for the favor not of God, but a CEO perhaps as powerful. Or wholly not. A-

Dirty Harry (1971)

Forty years on “Dirty Harry” still packs a massive sucker punch with Clint Eastwood as Det. Harry Callahan tearing through San Francisco hunting down a serial killer named Scorpio, a bloody rip-off of the infamous real-life Zodiac killer. I can’t imagine the wake this film made when it landed, focusing on a policeman who shoots first, despises authority, and proudly stands as an equal opportunity offender. Yet, with Zodiac never caught, it must have served as cathartic fantasy. It still does. Directed by Don Siegel, the film’s anger at failed authorities, red tape laws that coddle criminals, and crime itself sure as hell resonates now. Every police thriller since has cribbed, stolen, and downloaded the attitude and violence of “Harry,” and every guy has at some point recited Eastwood’s “punk” speech as he stares down killers, bosses, the camera, and the audience alike. It’s one of the seminal performances of film, a modern day Western, with a sheriff who tosses his badge to lay down the law. Also classic: A rocket fast pace, an absolute refusal to show any story outside of the hero’s work, and a seriously frightening villain (Andy Robinson) with no motive other than to kill. A+

This Means War (2012)

“This Means War” exists for one reason: Make college girls debate who’s hotter, the guy who was Kirk in the new “Star Trek,” or the Brit guy from “Inception.” My wife and I heard the chatter as the credits rolled. So, in a sense, “War” succeeds. Not for me. This ugly flick requires smart, self-assured actress Reese Witherspoon to play the fool, and she is no fool. The plot: Chris Pine (Kirk) and Tom Hardy (Brit guy) play “GQ” blowhard CIA agents both wooing a lonely commercial market researcher (Witherspoon) for sport. Lauren is so shocked that two men (!) would pay her amorous attention that she falls oblivious to each man’s outlandish lies and eerily perfect dates, so we in the audience snicker at what a slack-jawed, wide-eyed rube she is. Of course, Lauren learns the truth and forgives instantly. Toss in much nonsensical guns and chases, boom, movie! Try and get past the following: Pine’s lothario meets Lauren at a DVD rental store; the men stalk and spy on Lauren, and it’s meant to be funny; and Pine and Hardy spark hotter chemistry with each other than with Wiherspoon. Hmm. McG directs, without mercy. C-

The Recruit (2003)

When a brilliant hotshot (Colin Farrell) is recruited to join the CIA and his trainer/boss/mentor looks and sounds and does that whole wiggy Al Pacino thing, and is, in fact, Al Pacino, something must be wrong. “I got a bad feeling about this” wrong. And, that’s “The Recruit,” a spy thriller from Roger Donaldson, who made the terrific 1980s mind-screw “No Way Out.” You know the way out here, though, because … did I mention Al Pacino? In a literal spotlight at one point? Sporting a goatee? This is by-the-numbers with every twist underlined by a loud music cue, but it’s not a terrible affair. Pacino overacts with zeal, having fun showing the whipper snappers on set (Farrell, Bridget Moynahan) how you spook the guys behind the cameras and holding the boom mikes. Drinking while watching? Take a shot every time Farrell loses the American accent. And, yes, I skipped a plot summary. (Al Pacino.) C+