(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Adam Zacharias delves through the UAEs latest cinema releases
Nightcrawler
Jake Gyllenhaal has been garnering the best reviews of his career in Nightcrawler playing a Los Angeles crime journalist who will sink to abhorrent measures to deliver his story.
Desperate for work Lou Bloom finds his niche reporting on the worst that LA has to offer – covering everything from fires to car crashes to murder for news channels and their voyeuristic audiences.
But as Lou gets tangled up in this awful world of exploitation he finds the lines of morality begin to blur together. Rene Russo Bill Paxton and Riz Ahmed co-star.
“It creeps under the viewer’s skin much like the predatory title character who restlessly cruises through this modern-day media allegory like Travis Bickle’s long-lost hyper-wired West Coast cousin” said Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post.
“A dark dream of a thriller full of evil that floats like a toxic cloud across an already tainted city” said Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal.
Nightcrawler currently has a 95% rating on rottentomatoes.com and an 8.2/10 rating on imdb.com.
Trivia
Nightcrawler writer-drector Dan Gilroy is the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Frank D. Gilroy and is married to Rene Russo.
The Pyramid
James Buckley – aka the boastful fibber Jay in British sitcom The Inbetweeners – turns his hand to horror in this new flick by French director Gregory Levasseur (Mirrors).
A team of American archeologists head to Egypt where they discover an enormous Pyramid buried in the desert. But the group’s elation soon turns to terror as they get lost in the vast structure’s innards and find themselves hunted by a deadly creature.
Reviews are yet to surface for the film which co-stars Ashley Hinshaw and Denis O’Hare and comes out this weekend in the States as well as the UAE.
The Pyramid currently has no rating on rottentomatoes.com or imdb.com.
Trivia
Among the movie’s producers is French filmmaker Alexandre Aja who directed 2010 horror comedy Piranha 3D - co-produced by The Pyramid director Gregory Levasseur.
Reclaim
Director Alan White (Broken) assembles a starry cast for this sub-par thriller dealing with the subject of child trafficking.
Ryan Philippe and Rachel Lefevre play a couple who decide to adopt a young orphan named Nina from Haiti. But once they travel abroad to finalise the adoption Nina vanishes – drawing them into a dangerous search to uncover the truth. John Cusack and Luis Guzman also appear in the film which has been panned as formulaic and uninvolving by critics.
“There are no twists or even surprises except the final realisation that director Alan White is taking his culturally clueless ineptly shot B-movie totally seriously” said Elizabeth Weitzman of The New York Daily News.
“The screenplay is constructed from plot mechanics and the emotional stakes grow less convincing with every twist of the screw” said Sheri Linden of The Los Angeles Times.
Reclaim currently has a 0% rating on rottentomatoes.com and a 4.8/10 rating on imdb.com.
Trivia
Miami native Briana Roy who plays eight-year-old Nina claimed the hardest part of her role was switching between English French and Creole dialogue.