Poker Face (2022) - Movie Review

I picked this film purely for nostalgic reasons, and I don’t mean that in a fond way. Russell Crowe’s directorial debut, The Water Diviner, was one of the first movies I ever reviewed on here way back in December of 2014. That was back when I was still heavily in the phase of obsessing over people who talked about movies, as opposed to obsessing over the movies themselves, and I still had a lot of growing up to do as a writer and just as a person in general. Chances are there are quite a few films from back then that I’d likely have a different take on if I were to write about them today (hell, that has definitely been the case for a few of them, like The Babadook), but Crowe’s first attempt as a director has never struck me as one of those potential examples. So, let’s see how he goes at his second attempt in the chair, and him now writing the script as well.

The Crime Boss (Arkansas) (2020) - Movie Review

Merely seeing an actor’s body of work isn’t always enough to predict the kind of stories they’ll want to tell if they step behind the camera. Watching Jordan Peele’s sitcom and sketch-com work doesn’t exactly feel like the lead-up to becoming the man currently leading the charge for black horror in the mainstream. Ben Stiller’s frequently-frothy leading man roles feel a bit out of step with his penchant for tearing the entertainment industry several new ones as a director. And in the case of today’s film, seeing Clark Duke as the nerdy Jacob in Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (the only close-to-watchable part of that entire flick) certainly didn’t prepare me for his first step into writing/producing/directing to be this Southern-fried trailer park neo-noir.