Movies starring Michael Shannon

As straightforward “based on a true story” movies go, Loving is a strong account of the key factual events that led to the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision overturning anti-miscegenation laws. Effectively acted and occasionally moving...

Machine Gun Preacher uses the "real-life" story of Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) as the framework for a movie that is part drama, part action, and part social conscience. Like Hotel Rwanda, it seeks to provide a human context to one of Africa's most...

Note: There is a "spoiler" in passing for Star Trek into Darkness. Not a big thing if you've seen the movie (or even if you haven't) but don't say you haven't been warned. I also refer in vague terms to the ending of this film. Khan has returne...

The ghost of Mark Twain looms large over Jeff Nichols' Mud, a modern-day homage to the settings and characters popularized in some of Twain's best loved works. The protagonists in Mud, a couple of 14-year olds, are named Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Ne...

Nocturnal Animals employs one of the most inventive uses of neo noir tropes and techniques I have seen in recent years. Intense, insightful, and strangely powerful, Tom Ford’s adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel, Tony and Susan, assumes a...

It comes as a bit of a surprise that, for consistently suspenseful chase sequences, the pick of the 2012 summer crop is the under-the-radar thriller from writer/director David Koepp, Premium Rush. The average chase, filmed with the traditional sele...

Moody and brooding, Scott Teems’ The Quarry falls loosely within a genre that has been dubbed “Western noir” by some critics. Undoubtedly a serious work that attempts to address immigration tensions and personal redemption, the film suff...

The Runaways is a well-made but generic account of the rise and collapse of a musical group. In piecing together this partially fictionalized account of the mid-1970s girl rock band, The Runaways, writer/director Floria Sigismondi has erred on the...

Although Guillermo del Toro was never given the opportunity to bring his vision of The Hobbit to the screen, movie-goers over the years have not been deprived of his brand of horror-tinged fantasy. With his latest, the story is a variation on ...