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This isn’t “Wall Street” … or the sequel … or any of the other hot-shot money-flinging investment scumwad movies. This isn’t a flashy Tom Cruise-esque glorification of greed. There’s no sex, no wild parties, nothing that will make for a good TV commercial. This film will likely fly under the radar and, to a younger audience, probably appear quite dull. The power of this film is it’s understatement and calm.

This is a smoothly flowing look at what happens when a major investment brokerage on the brink suddenly discovers they’ve gone past it. The entire movie covers 24 hours of real time. At the start of the film, they’re in the middle of a “blood bath” of layoffs. By the end of the movie, they’re more or less scuttling all their investors in order to save the company for the few who will remain.

The cast is amazing. Kevin Spacey as the head of the risk assessment…

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You may have to go out of your way to find this movie, or maybe you’ll have to find it on DVD, but it will be worth the wait. This is one of the smartest and most well-made movies I’ve seen in a long, long while.

The basic premise is simplicity itself. Brendan Gleeson plays a highly eccentric Irish policeman. When international drug traffickers come to his small town, Don Cheadle from the FBI arrives to help work the case. Easy enough.

At first this movie seems charming but benign. Gleeson is foul-mouthed and mean-tempered. He samples drugs and hookers. But behind all that you sense a very keen mind. The first twenty minutes are entertaining, but the hook comes when the bad guys are revealed.

The first time you see them, they’re driving down a country road comparing Nietzsche quotes. They’re drug dealers and all that, but the level of discussion is very intellectual. It’s serious, yet hilarious at the…

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Gremlins In Space

This movie probably deserves better than two-and-a-half stars. It’s not really that bad. But I’m knocking it down a bit because they took a great premise and ruined it.

The premise in this film is that footage from the last actual moon landing shows that there’s critters up there. That eat people. Kind of. It’s shot in the “mockumentary” style made (in)famous by the “Blair Witch Project,” which I’ve always felt was the reality TV equivalent for film-making. There’s simply no substitute for a good cast, good direction, and good cinematography.

So I knocked down my rating right there because what could have been a stark and eerie film ended up looking like . . . the “Blair Witch Project.” The concept was great – to suggest a reason for stopping the moon landings based on an alien threat instead of political bullshit is great. It kind of borrowed from “Alien” in that the…

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First, let me say that I dig Kevin Smith. “Dogma” was one of the most brilliant things ever put on film and his concert films are epic. He’s kind of like the anti-Belichick on stage, he spends an hour answering one question and in the process gives you his life story.

“Red State” is his new political-social-horror flick and it’s tough for me to give it only 3.5 stars. Tough because it’s a film that needed to be made. Tough because I see where he was trying to go. And tough because . . . I dig Kevin Smith. If there was one word that summed up my rating it would be: “uneven.”

OK. So in a nutshell this one is about one of those hardcore Christian fundamentalist churches – you know: “praise the Lord and the ammunition”. They think homosexuals are the tool of the devil, aren’t really people, and therefore aren’t covered by that annoying…

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I have kind of a hard time giving this film only 3.5 stars. It’s well made, well acted, and well directed. It’s kind of an update of the Raquel Welch film, “Hannie Caulder,” but without the depth. Given that Luc Besson co-wrote this film, it’s kind of surprising that it fell short in this way.

Zoe Saldana does a great job as the heroine, a little girl in Bogata who grows up and then seeks revenge years later on the men who killed her parents. She looks great in this movie and handles the action scenes well. Her thin frame isn’t something viewers are used to seeing in this kind of role – people in the “assassin” role are usually beefed up in kind of a para-military way.

The problems with this movie start early, after Cataleya (Saldana) gets to Chicago and tells her uncle (who is a killer) that she wants to be a killer too, in…