Reviews

Set in a future Berlin, the series portrays two parallel universes connected by a portal that allows communication and travel for credentialed individuals. Both worlds have residents--counterparts--who appear physically identical but who may have different histories and personalities due to the time elapsed since the worlds split. Reflecting Cold War animosities, the two universes do not play well together.

Despite its intriguing premise, able cast, and slick opening credits and theme music, Counterpart fails to rise above a soap opera, with each episode offering only a vague plot, confusing relationships, unexplained violence, gratuitous nudity, sex, and f-words, and dialogue that sounds like the output of a random-sentence generator.

The phenomenal talent of J. K. Simmons in his dual role as Howard Silk keeps us watching, however. An ordinary office worker in one universe and an extraordinary spy in the other, Simmons inhabits both characters flawlessly, often in the same frame. Other cast members have the same opportunity, but Simmons nails it, maintaining every nuance of each personality. Still, the series gives us a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces lost.

The filmmakers couldn't be bothered to give us a complete story, but they nailed the trendy stuff: strong women, weak men, interracial sex, lesbian romance, and of course, foul language. Amazon Prime Video changed the title to "Space Force: Battlefront" probably to sidestep the bad reviews.

The film's first hour nearly loses the audience while developing the uneasy relationships of the three main characters. Roy (Arjun Singh Panam) is an aerospace engineer who was let go when another company bought out his employer just as the satellite he designed was almost ready for launch. Mike (Tom England) is a radio astronomer who was hired soon after the buyout and has no idea why Roy, who thinks Mike took his job, dislikes him. Harry (Joshua Ford), an astronomer and also a former employee of the same company, respects both of his colleagues but makes matters worse as he tries to smooth the rough edges between them.

The three men sit huddled in their car in the woods, examining the cold, night sky with their high-tech gadgetry, when Mike detects an intriguing signal at a specific frequency. He broadcasts a standard greeting back to the source at the same frequency and waits. Eventually, Mike receives a return that resembles his message but that cannot be a simple "bounce" because the message has changed. As the men realize that this could be the first contact with an alien intelligence, one thing after another goes wrong. Mike starts to record the transmission, but his hard drive fails, forcing him to maintain the data in the computer's volatile memory, just as the battery is running low. The men scramble to collect their gear and drive back to headquarters, but they have trouble starting the car. When the car finally starts, they take off at top speed but run into a roadblock. Tension builds into a frantic countdown that resembles the climax of a Mission Impossible film.

Believable characters, fine acting, and a good soundtrack compensate for the implausible story elements and slow start.

Good special effects and an able cast breathe life into this gorefest set in the dreary dystopia of 2008 London. Rutger Hauer lets his bad-boy personna run wild as Harley Stone, an out-of-control cop subsisting on chocolate and heavily sugarred coffee, while Alastair Duncan, a familiar face to British audiences, adds comic relief as Stone's straight-laced, Oxford-educated partner Dick Durkin. UK native Kim Cattrall adds much-needed warmth to the story as Stone's girlfriend and widow of Stone's late partner.

Today the movie would be considered more social commentary, with the prologue specifically calling out the United States for its consistent opposition to U.N. efforts to counteract global warming, which, in the story, has left London under several inches of water.

If you like mysteries and enjoy deciphering visual symbolism, "Stoker" should appeal to you.

Devastated by her father's death, high-school senior India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) attends the funeral party gathered for refreshments at the family's country estate, where she meets Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), her father's younger brother who she never knew existed. India's Aunt Gwendolyn (Jacki Weaver) and family friend Mrs. McGarrick (Phyllis Somerville) know Charlie all too well, however, and are deeply upset that he has reappeared in their lives. The basis for their fear is the mystery that the film gradually unravels.

Handsome, suave Uncle Charlie has an interest in India that seems more than avuncular. He also has an eye for India's mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), whose pampered, privileged life has left her unprepared to be anything more than the perfect hostess. Family tensions grow as this coming-of-age story progresses to a violent ending.

The movie's poster image--an ant crawling out of human flesh--makes us think B-grade horror movie, but "Phase IV" is instead an intelligent, suspenseful, science-fiction film delivered with jaw-dropping photography.

A mysterious event in space has subtle but far-reaching effects on earth. Ants of mutually hostile species begin communicating with one another--meeting, planning, and collaborating in an effort to defend themselves against any creatures that threaten them, eventually driving out the human population of a small Arizona community.

English biologist Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) develops a strategy to study the newly intelligent ants, and with a grant from the National Science Foundation and the help of game theorist James Lesko (Michael Murphy), he sets up a research station in the Arizona desert near where a large ant colony has built several tall, geometric towers. After days pass without any visible ant activity, Hubbs makes the first move. The ants retaliate, and the games begin. As each side probes the other's strengths and weaknesses, the conflict escalates into a life-or-death struggle.

Extended scenes using close-up photography show ants exhibiting clearly intelligent behavior without even a hint of animation. Again and again the viewer wonders, "How did they film that?"

Nigel Davenport's powerful dramatic presence and stage-English diction give the film at times the quality of a Shakespearean tragedy, which in a sense it is: one man's hubris and single-mindedness cause destruction when he could have accomplished great things.

Martin Duran (Beau Knapp) is an auditor at OmniBank, a prestigious New York bank, who infuriates the bank's president by questioning the accounting practices of a major potential client and so gets demoted to their branch bank in the farming community of Elba, New York, where he grew up. There he not only must contend with the animosity of the townspeople, who view him as an outsider, but he also must try to reconnect with his estranged family--his father (Kurt Russell), a stubborn potato farmer facing foreclosure, and his brother Caleb (Luke Hemsworth), a damaged Iraq War veteran.

In auditing the books of Endelman Gallery, a client of the Omni branch, he notices accounting peculiarities, and with the help of his boyhood friend Earl (Jeremie Harris), now a local store owner who also is knowledgeable about cryptocurrencies and the Dark Web, he begins to suspect that the art gallery is laundering money through Bitcoin transactions.

As Martin delves further into Omni's relationship with the gallery, people he has interviewed start turning up dead He must find out who is behind the crime and alert authorities before the body count rises.

A solid, mostly well-acted drama, although its slow pacing and Knapp's one-note performance will put many viewers to sleep.

What we have here is a late-night monster movie in which the monster is an artificially intelligent computer, which controls all functions at a nuclear power plant and which, of course, goes haywire, initiating a process that could lead to a meltdown while viewing power-plant personnel both as entities it must protect and as viruses infecting the system. Technicians frantically scramble to hack through the computer's digital defenses, but the hurricane that rages outside delays desperately needed expertise.

Not a bad plot, but the execution is just silly. Much of the dialog sounds improvised, and most of the scenes appear to have been filmed on the first take. Nevertheless, if you have nothing better to do, grab some popcorn and maybe an adult beverage, sit back, and get ready to smile!

A decade before Matt Damon's first portrayal of Jason Bourne, "Timebomb" shows us a mind-control victim running from government assassins with a woman while attempting to learn his true identity.

Versatile action star Michael Biehn ("The Terminator", "Aliens", "The Abyss") portrays Eddy Kay, a watchmaker's assistant whose quiet, low-key life changes after he rescues a woman and her child from a burning building on his way home from work. Hailing him as a hero, local TV stations show him on screen, much to the concern of Col. Taylor (Richard Jordan), a black-ops leader whose team is in Los Angeles to assassinate a former special prosecutor who is an outspoken critic of covert operations and who is about to be confirmed as the new Attorney General. Taylor recognizes Eddy as a former team member thought to have died in a botched assignment. Believing that Eddy is going to compromise their mission, Taylor makes eliminating Eddy the team's top priority.

Awakening to find someone attacking him with a knife, Eddy defends himself, and the assailant flees into the night. When Eddy starts having nightmares and flashbacks showing him glimpses of a former, violent life he does not recognize, he seeks the help of psychotherapist Anna Nolmar (Patsy Kensit), a recent watch-repair customer. After more attempts on his life, Eddy suspects that Dr. Nolmar is involved, so he kidnaps her and takes her with him on the run. He soon realizes that she is not to blame, but now the assassins are targeting them both.

The film would deserve a higher rating were it not for its many plot gaps and confusing premise. Richard Jordan's strong performance initially convinces us that Eddy is a threat, but why he thinks Eddy has risen from the dead specifically to defeat their current operation is never satisfactorily explained.

Watching a movie requires viewers to suspend their disbelief, and this movie has much to disbelieve. We can talk about the unoriginal story, cookie-cutter characters, stiff acting, and phony science, but what's the point? A movie is worth your time if it entertains, and "Earthstorm" succeeds at least in doing that, so let's look at what this film gives us to enjoy.

First, the special effects are not bad. People tend to confuse the "how" with the "what" when judging special effects so that the effects often get the blame for low plausibility. In this film, though, "how" they show is credible even if "what" they show is not.

Second, the music is quite good. It sustains tension throughout the film and adds emotional content at key points--exactly what it a movie score supposed to do.

Third, the acting is adequate. This isn't a film by Cameron, Kubrick, or Crichton, so let's cut the cast some slack. I've never met any demolition experts, but I bet they're more like Stephen Baldwin in "Earthstorm" than like Bruce Willis in "Armageddon". And seeing Dirk Benedict ("Faceman" from the 1980s TV series "The A-Team") as the smug, self-important science advisor to The White House is a treat.

Best of all is the film's message. More-realistic sci-fi movies such as "Alien", "Europa Report", "Gravity", and "The Martian" tell us that space exploration is dangerous and largely unnecessary as if filmmakers want us to stay on our home planet. "Earthstorm" has a positive message: The more we know about space, the better prepared we are to protect life on earth.

Sci-fi has come a long way from the 1950s, but anyone who admires "The Day the Earth Stood Still" has no excuse for disliking this movie.