A Celebration of Cinema

An intense performance by Vanessa Kirby is probably the best reason to watch Benjamin Caron’s thriller drama Night Always Comes. Based on the novel The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin, the movie tells the gripping story of Lynette (Kirby), who lives in Portland, Oregon and desperately tries to secure both a house and a future for her family.  Lynette needs 25.000 for a down payment on the house she lives in together with her brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen), who suffers from Down syndrome. Her mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is also there, but she seems to have an agenda of her own as she suddenly squanders the money meant for the house. This propels Lynette into action, in a way resembling other movies - both Deux Jours, One Nuit by the Brothers Dardenne and Good Time by The Safdie Brothers - as she begins an odyssey that leads her to multiple colorful characters from her past, some more sympathetic than others (and some more criminal than others). Even though the...

A father and daughter are reunited in the new action drama series Butterfly, which is set in South Korea and takes place in the world of  international intelligence and espionage.  Daniel Dae Kim plays David Jung, a former operative who faked his own death to give his daughter Rebecca (Reina Hardesty) a chance at a normal life.  However, nine years later, Rebecca is now a deadly assassin, working for the same Caddis operation that David used to work for. Caddis is run by Juno, in who we recognize Piper Perabo, who once used to dance in and on a bar in the cult classic Coyote Ugly (2000), but is now tough-as-nails enough to routinely kill off disloyal employees.  Like Daniel, though, she cares about her offspring, in this case slightly insecure son Oliver (Louis Landau), who doesn’t really know if he’s got what it takes to follow in his mother’s footsteps.  Rebecca, for her part, doesn’t really know whether she wants to hug her father, or kill him. She casually w...

Bob Odenkirk and friends get a well-deserved victory lap with the entertaining Nobody 2, even if the ultra-violent action comedy lacks the urgency of the first movie. Nobody (2021), written by Derek Kolstad  and directed by Ilya Naishuller, was an unexpected success, grossing almost sixty million dollar on a 16 million budget, and that’s before it became a huge hit on video on demand. A sequel made sense, especially in an industry looking for fresh franchises, but if the new movie lacks anything, it’s quite obviously the element of surprise. The first movie made us believe that an ordinary and even somewhat docile family man, Hutch Mansell, could after a simple burglary become an overnight avenging angel with a rage so big he could take on (and out) a complete Russian crime mob.  Halfway through the movie, though, it became clear that Hugh was a former trained operative who had tried to put his violent past behind him to give himself and his family - h...