Because Everybody Else Has One

Bringing the classic Western to modern day America once and for all. This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about A divorced father and his ex-con brother go on a small-time bank-robbing spree to save their late mother's house from being foreclosed by the bank but even as their own fractious relationship threatens to corrode their entire enterprise, a pair of Texas Rangers come ever closer to catching up with them. What we thought Essentially a modern reinvention of the western, Hell or High Water uses its simple, bare-bones plot to explore a post-recession America, where greedy banks and everyday people feed off each other and the line between victim and criminal grows ever blurrier. Far more than just a polemical screed against banks, though, it's mostly an intimate character study of its four central characters, punctuated by a simmering tension broiling beneath the surface whose ultimate eruption into brutal violence is as inevitable as ...

Late again, I know. Look out for a good ol' roundup soon, but for now, here's another disappointing effects movie. Also at Channel 24 . What it's about After being murdered by his partner, a dirty cop gets a second chance to make amends and take revenge as he joins the Rest In Peace Department, a post-mortem law enforcement agency tasked with stopping the dead from wreaking havoc on the living. What we thought R.I.P.D, the 674 th comic book movie to be released this year, looks, at the outset, to have plenty going for it. It has a good director, a cast that ranges from solid (Ryan Reynolds) to excellent (Jeff Bridges, Mary-Louise Parker) and a really neat high-concept premise. Unfortunately, though it's nowhere near the turkey that most critics have deemed it to be, it squanders most of its promise, even as it constantly hints towards better movies and its own underlying potential. It's especially irritating that the film could so easily be bette...