Movies starring Jan

Hampton Fancher's The Minus Man is a methodical, chilling excursion into the mind of a serial killer. And, like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, it seeks to explore, not to exploit. Those on a quest for complete understanding won't find it her...

The Mist is what a horror film should be - dark, tense, and punctuated by just enough gore to keep the viewer's flinch reflex intact. In fact, that movie's ending is so uncompromising that one must assume director Frank Darabont had final cut so t...

Monster-in-Law is appalling misfire of a comedy - a motion picture that takes a situation ripe for the blackest vein of satire and reduces it to a puerile and edgeless pile of goo. Forgive me for a moment if I bemoan the lost potential here. Give...

On the surface, Moonlight presents three formative episodes in the life of a gay black man, but taking such a bird’s eye view of the film misses all the details and nuances. Although Barry Jenkins’ film is indeed about the struggles and d...

It's not often that a slasher/thriller is released by a recognized distributor of art-house fare (in this case, Sony Pictures Classics), but that's the case with Mute Witness. Of course, it's somewhat unfair to pigeon-hole this movie by using the ...

It’s a fair assessment that my overall unfamiliarity with Indian cinema may have amplified some of my criticisms of Mani Ratnam’s Nayagan (or, as it is also known, Nayakan). Two aspects that I found to be distracting – the oddly-placed mu...

Unconventionality is not always an asset and, in attempting to experiment with offbeat techniques to encourage viewer engagement, director RaMell Ross has inadvertently done the opposite, creating distance instead of immersion. In film, shaky cam-...

At the time of The Night of the Hunter’s release, the motion picture industry was in flux. Beset by the perceived threat presented by television, the studios were looking for ways to go bigger and better: color, advanced sound, widescreen as...

At its best, Nightbitch offers a deeply honest, emotionally unsettling portrait of the darker side of parenting. Unfortunately, those moments are counterbalanced by a metaphorical story element that devolves into an exercise in campiness so tonall...

Like Shakespeare's Hamlet and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of those stories that is re-made on a fairly consistent basis. If you don't like the latest incarnation of the count, wait a few years and there will be anothe...