REVIEW: Dream Scenario, Butcher’s Crossing, and The Retirement Plan [Nicolas Cage Triple Bill]

Dream Scenario

Butcher’s Crossing

The Retirement Plan

Only three of the six Nicolas Cage films released this year, not counting his cameo in The Flash, Dream Scenario, Butcher’s Crossing, and The Retirement Plan showcase the variety and inconsistency of his output.…

REVIEW: The Old Way

They just don’t make ’em like they used to, though they try.

The Old Way is a by-the-books Western, distinguished only by being Nicolas Cage’s “first” out-and-out foray into the genre.

When we first encounter outlaw Colton Briggs (Cage, complete with droopy mustache), he’s watching a public hanging preceded over by his employer, a self-righteous local bigwig.…

REVIEW: Pig

Every half decade or so, Nicolas Cage will take a break from scenery chewing, or “western Kabuki” as he likes to call it, and commit to delivering a low-key character study in a well-observed indie.

In Pig, the feature debut of writer-director Michael Samoski, he subsumes himself, hunched and bearded, in the role of Rob, a reclusive truffle hunter who lives alone in the mossy forests of Oregon.…

REVIEW: Willy’s Wonderland

For most actors, the switch to straight-to-VOD still feels like a step down. Even now, there’s something about the big screen that seems to promise a sort of immortality not guaranteed by the vagaries of streaming service algorithms.

Not so with Nicolas Cage, for whom acting seems to be an endearing mix of day-job professionalism and performative insanity.…

REVIEW: Colour Out Of Space [LFF 2019]

Colour Out Of Space, Richard Stanley’s first film since being fired from 1996’s The Island Of Doctor Moreau, loses itself in what is, essentially, the colour of the inside of your eyelids.

The pink glow in question comes from a mysterious meteorite, which crashes down on the front lawn of the Gardner family, a bunch of city-dwellers recently escaped to rural Massachusetts.…

LFF Day 7: The Birth of a Nation, Dog Eat Dog, & I Am Not A Serial Killer

The Birth of a Nation

Reclaiming the title of D.W. Griffith’s feverishly racist silent epic, this ardent biography of conciliatory preacher turned revolutionary firebrand Nat Turner — written, directed by, and starring Nate Parker — makes a case for bloody retribution as the necessary, even inevitable, response to institutionalized evil.…

Joe ties Nicolas Cage to the stake and prods a great performance out of him

 

Nicholas Cage is a visionary; he strides boundaries.

Few can claim a filmography as eclectic as his: from Rumble Fish to Vampires Kiss, through Con Air and Face/Off, Adaptation and Lord of War, to Ghost Rider, Kick-Ass, and now Joe.