We were looking for a short film and this ‘number one in the Netherlands’ is 95 minutes. But why is this ‘number one’?
Journalist Laura joins a luxury cruise of a wealthy businessman to report about a cancer fund for the businessman’s wife. Laura runs into a strange scheme which seems to imply that the money is not going to the fund of the wife with leukemia, but to her husband.
A not too interesting thriller.
In different times a naked, dead body is found at the same spot in Whitechapel. The different inspectors assigned to the case discover all kinds of strange details. The body is shot in the eye, but there is no bullet and later inspectors discover the earlier cases.
In a quite amusing story that reminds a bit of “Dark” the creators slowly explain the happenings. The story becomes rather complex, a bit too much so to satisfactorily wrap things up in the last episode perhaps.
Yet all in all “Bodies” is certainly one of the better (mini) series that I saw recently.
Sarah (Lilly James) took files from her former employer which prove a massive cover up. Seeing her life in danger she changes her mind and finds the help of Ash (Riz Ahmed) to return the documents with the assurance of being left alone.
“Relay” opens right in the middle of the tension. A very interesting cat and mouse game unfolds in which Ash is trying to turn things for the better for his client. Resourceful as he is, he keeps Sarah’s followers at bay.
“Relay” could have been an entertaining film, had Mackenzie not thought it a good idea to make an awful plot twist towards the end.
I must say that the cast gave me higher expectations…
Rami Malek plays Heller, a data security nerd working for the CIA. His wife gets killed while on a business trip, he uses his permissions to investigate the matter quicker than his boss. Then he finds out that his boss is involved in unauthorised activities. He decides to blackmail his boss in order to get after the killers of his wife.
Trained by Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), he escapes and proves to be more inventive than expected. A fairly predictive and not too interesting thriller unfolds.
The death of an actor can be a reason to look up a film. Michael Madsen passed away, so last weekend we watched “Die Another Day” and “Species”. Madsen played in a lot of film with very low IMDb ratings, “Species” is rated 5.9. I may have seen it before.
In a laboratorium an alien is bred who is human-looking. When it proves to be dangerous, the child-like-looking alien is about to be gassed, but she gets away. Growing quickly, the alien soon is a sexy full grown woman looking to create offspring.
A bit of action, a bit of thriller, sex scenes as they were always in movies of these days. Quite a stack of actors too, such as Ben Kingsley and Forest Witaker (in a weak role). Not a great film. The IMDb rating is even a bit high.
I figured that when Nicole Kidman agreed to play the main part, the film cannot be that bad. Well, wrong.
Kidman plays Nancy Vandergroot, a woman who in a hard time in her life, met a man and moved to the very conservative little town Holland, Michigan. The village is portrayed as one of those places where Dutch settlers have stopped time and still wear funny head wear and clogs. Somebody had the idea that the Dutch eat meatloaf and have these (Pennsylvania Dutch?) star type folk art.
Anyway, Nancy develops paranoia when she runs into photo reels of her husband. With a colleague she sets out unmasking her cheating husband, while in the process she becomes the cheater herself. When the duo starts to learn about the husband’s extramerital activities, the pretty dull film turns into a pretty dull thriller.
In a gloomy, crime-ridden city with dirty cops and dirty politicians, a drug deal goes horribly wrong. Tom Hardy plays the cop Walker, who is knee deep in his city’s mud.
Things go from bad to worse. During an escape, a cop get seriously injured, a while later there is a shoot out in an Asian restaurant, which causes an Asian gang to come to town for revenge, one of the suspects is indirectly connected to Walker and his ‘double alliances’ navigate him into a tight spot. On top of all, dirty colleagues prove to be a major player in the whole affair.
“Havoc” is dirty, bloody and dark. A descent Netflix thriller.
I only heard that there was a season 4 when it was named among Oscar nominations or something. “Night Country” has a crew almost entirely made of women. The main characters, the directors, the title song, etc.
We have a great Jody Foster as grumpy police officer who was transferred to the (fictional) town Ennis so far North in Alaska that the sun does not rise during the winter months. The rough climate and small community makes that everybody knows everything of everyone (or do they?), even when the ‘new Americans’ and Iñupiat (‘Alaskan Inuit’) have to live together.
As you will have guessed, just as in the previous seasons, “Night Country” is slow, dark, gritty and the case is extreme. The main characters have their problems and have had their problems in the past.
Danvers (Foster) is a demanding chief of police with a foul tongue and unorthodox methods. In a case surrounding the disappearance of the men working at the Tsalal Research Station, things seem to oddly align with an early case, the murder of a young Iñupiat woman, a sister of Evangeline Navarro a native who is now Trooper.
In an interestingly developing story, the cases are investigated, characters develop and Iñupiat stories are mixed with the cold, hard facts of the investigation. The little town also inhabits some odd characters.
A good series, but not of the level of the original.
A man walks into a fancy law firm. A massive chemical factory near his land, poisons his land and cattle and he wants something to be done. Initially reluctant, Rob Bilott takes up the case.
For the next decades, Bilott, who started sceptically, sees a growing pile of evidence that a big, local employer willingly pollutes its environment. They even manage to use legislation to their advantage. The more evidence Bilott finds, the more opposition he meets. From the firm that he works for, the chemical factory, even society and his family. Big money destroys everything and nobody is willing to do something against that.
“Dark Waters” tells a story that is sadly no fiction. It is something that plays all over the world, for many years in the past and probably for many years to come. Money not only goes over environment, but even over the health of people. Once super polluting companies have been set up and running, nobody is going to risk damaging the economy in order to prevent further pollution.
A descent old fashion court thriller.
On Tuesday 22 February 2022 a man walks into the Apple Store in Amsterdam trying to take the entire store hostage. The man, completely disappointed by society, requests a gigantic amount of crypto currency and a get-away. This film is based on those events.
What Boermans did well was giving context to the whole event. All but one of the hostages managed to get away from the gun-waving captor. In the first scenes of the film, we get to know this man a little. Also interesting are the scenes shot in the 112 (the European 911) control roam and the entire operation that was set up in no time. One of the busiest squares of Amsterdam had to be cleared because the captor carried explosives. Different units had to be rattled up, brought in position, information needed to be gathered and – partly because the captor explicitly asked for a negotiator – we also have a look into the workings of such a negotiating team.
The film mostly shows the apple store with the two people in it, four people who have fled into a tiny storage room and the main characters of the operation to control the situation.
A fairly simple (yet tragic) event makes a fairly tense thriller movie. The only down part is the typically Dutch ‘underacting’ of most of the actors.