Three Films Make A Post: The most corrupt cop you've ever seen on screen.

211 (2018): To be honest, going into a contemporary movie with Nicolas Cage I do tend to hope it provides the great, strange actor with opportunity to do great, strange acting, so when I encounter him in a more bread and butter action thriller like York Alec Shackleton’s 211, I do find myself a little disappointed. However, if you are able to get over that little problem, you may find this to be very decent film. Shackleton’s direction is a bit too network TV like to really thrill me, but the film’s story is clearly told, and clear effort is  put into characterizing everyone involved, certainly putting this above the level of a lot of low budget shoot ‘em ups.

It’s not really the film’s fault I’d rather watch something crazier than this perfectly decent little number.

Coyote Lake (2019): Sara Seligman’s film about a mother-daughter duo (Adriana Barraza and Camila Mendes) who run a bed-and-breakfast practically on the US/Mexican border which they use to murder, rob and drown men working for the cartels, isn’t exactly a crazy film either. But here, the insistence on telling a tale that would usually make for a pretty extreme exploitation movie by avoiding practically all exploitative elements one way or the other, and instead focussing on a pretty horrible mother-daughter relationship, is actually what makes it interesting as well as pretty admirable. Seligman has a good grip on the elements of the material she has chosen to focus on, the actors are doing very good work (which is particularly important in a film that’s not at all focussing on the violence inherent in the material), so things come together nicely, creating an unassumingly effective film about family, freedom and weaponized capitalism.


Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019): The second Spider-Man film taking place in the MCU with Tom Holland – and again directed by Jon Watts – is a strange little (huge) film. It is strange in the best way, daring a weird teen comedy vibe, destroying beautiful European cities as seen through US tourist eyes and using well-loved  elements of the Spider-Man myth and the MCU to goof off. Frankly, all of this shouldn’t work at all, and while this is indeed a surprisingly messy film whose structure doesn’t bode well for the MCU-less future of our friendly neighbourhood wallcrawler, it is also a whole lot of fun, suggesting a bit more of a freewheeling approach than typical in this kind of blockbuster realm.