‘Confession’
Rent or buy on Amazon.
So many militants are mass madness with big explosions and even more death tolls. But I crave humility from time to time, and writer-director David Beton’s Confessions fits the bill perfectly. The action takes place in one place, in a church in Massachusetts, where Victor Strong (Stephen Moyer), a mysterious shooter with a bullet wound in the stomach, takes a priest hostage.
The dialogue-laden film moves like a drawn-out confession: both Victor and the priest, Father Peter (Colm Meaney), are broken, widowed parents estranged from their children. While Father Peter is extracting information from Victor – who is this mysterious person? – A fellow injured cop named Willow (Claire-Hope Ashiti) hides in the church closet to find the perfect moment to strike. In meat-and-potato shootouts, cinematographer Andrew Roger relies on wide shots and ominous blue lighting to give them a melancholic edge. Never fussy, Confessions feels like a tiny miracle of action.
“The Last Son”
Rent or buy on most major platforms.
I love dark westerns, especially those that explore the archetypes of the genre: Unforgiven, The Wild Bunch, Homebody, and so on. Directed by Tim Sutton, The Last Son, a gruesome, remorselessly violent tale, aims at more moderate targets but moves with the same vigor.
Borrowing Shakespearean vanity, Greg Johnson’s screenplay begins with the legend of Isaac LeMay (Sam Worthington), a ruthless marksman hired by the army to clear the plains of their native tribes. He caroused with women wherever he went, leaving offspring in almost every city. A Cheyenne chief’s prophecy – one of the outlaw’s children will kill him – leads him to scour the countryside to destroy his relatives.
Cold-blooded racist killers like LeMay are slowly disappearing from the Western landscape, as are the people who come to kill him: the bounty hunters, his bank robber son Cal (Machine Gun Kelly) and his quiet daughter Megan (Emily Marie Palmer) , subversion. genre. When these disparate characters cross paths, the animated final showdown between them, which involves a Gatling gun, turns into a bloody, wondrous mess.
“Profession: Rain”
Stream it on Netflix.
In the not too distant future, the last human survivors living on a devastated land are determined to fight the invading alien races to their last breath. Occupation: Rain, writer-director Luke Spark’s sequel to his film Occupation, takes place two years after the invasion. Some aliens, like Harry (Lawrence Makoar), have risked everything by teaming up with their human enemies to protect the planet. But earthlings not only do not trust their interstellar comrades, but also despise them.
This tension colors the protagonists: Amelia (Jet Tranter), an alien ally, faces off against genocidal Wing Commander Hayes (Daniel Gillis). Harry goes on a mission with a distrustful soldier (Dan Ewing) to find out the origin of a weapon their extraterrestrial enemies have codenamed Rainfall. Spark’s action movie features references to Starship Troopers, Crimson Tide, and Independence Day, as well as large-scale epic sets. The opening battle, worth watching in its own right, takes place in fiery, devastated Sydney and includes aerial dogfights, chaotic firefights, and a killer comet.
“Red stone”
Rent or buy on most major platforms.
Another spare part, writer-director Derek Presley’s historical gangster film Red Rock, has a remarkably gentle soul. It features a familiar opening: teenage delinquent Motley Adams (Dash Melrose) witnesses the murder of his brother Danny (Dominic Scott Kay) by ruthless crime boss Jed Haywood (Michael Cudlitz). After finding a precious ruby hidden by his brother, the titular redstone, Motley goes on the run to evade the FBI and thugs sent by Jed to kill him.
Five films to watch this winter
To expand on Red Rock, Presley luckily adds an adorable wrinkle to Boone (Neal McDonough), a grieving hit man hired by Jed. Boone, who dresses all in black, recently lost four family members in an accident. Before the end of the day, he needs to attend their funeral, move his grandmother to a less expensive home, and find Motley before the feds do. The climax might be the brooding Boone, armed with a lone gun, succumbing to remorse, and single-handedly fighting a ranch full of bandits. But the last shot, as an exhausted Boone lies in four graves with the sun kissing his cheek, is heartbreaking.
Kyusha (Ksenia Alekseeva), an orphan, desperately yearns for her family. She thinks she found her when failed writer Andrei (Pavel Trubiner) and his wife Olga (Marina Kazankova) adopt her from a bleak orphanage run by Andrei’s wicked former lover (Lyubov Tolkalina). Kyushi’s adoptive father tells her a legend. In Saint Petersburg, Russia, there is a clock tower built by the Tsar. It was once ruled by Pekko, the keeper of time, with a warning: if the clock stops, the city will plunge into darkness. Pekko obediently wound up the watch until his daughter died, which drove his wife insane and forced him to leave for good. Now only his heir, armed with his key, can break the darkness.
A terrifying adventure directed by Alexei Telnov, borrowing heavily from the Brothers Grimm and Lemony Snicket, Kyusha teams up with a broken wizard to save a dark city and his family from the clutches of an evil witch. Keepers of Time, especially in the way it shows Kyushi’s strength in the face of tragedy, gives children a delicate way to deal with difficult problems.
