As the espionage action begins to overpower the comedy, the film’s violence turns shockingly brutal at times, leading some of those laughs to catch in the throat. The film can be uneven in laughs and thrills, but when Kate McKinnon’s on screen that’s almost good enough.
Espionage
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Film Review: “A Most Wanted Man”
When the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the specter of international communism ceased its decades of haunting the frightened souls of the West, many commentators wondered if the espionage novelist John le Carrรฉ would suddenly run out of subjects. But the author, one of the best contemporary English novelists, simply applied […]
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Film Review: “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit”
After a 12-year absence, Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy’s popular CIA analyst hero, returns to the big screen in Kenneth Branagh’s “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.” Paramount Pictures’ latest attempt to reboot the series of films that began back in 1990 with John McTiernan’s “The Hunt For the Red October,” this new film recasts Ryan a young […]
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“Closed Circuit”
The recent revelations about the long history of the American government spying on its citizens through a variety of sophisticated methods make the appearance of the British film “Closed Circuit” especially relevant. Public knowledge and even tolerance of the myriad surveillance devices that observe and report on the actions of millions of people create an […]
