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The California Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials.
The title of “The Killing of Two Lovers” sounds at first like a spoiler, if it’s possible to spoil something that happens, or almost happens, in the very first scene. The lovers, Niki (Sepideh Moafi) and Derek (Chris Coy), are asleep in bed on a cold morning. Their putative killer, Niki’s husband, David (Clayne Crawford), looms over them (and us) with a loaded pistol. He takes aim but doesn’t shoot there are children in the house and instead takes off, fleeing in silent anguish from a situation that he knows no violence could solve.
The California Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as
Having previously delivered darkly satirical takes on cannibalism (2003’s “The Green Butchers”) and human genetic mutation (2016’s “Men & Chicken”) on which to hang his recurring themes of male bonding and extreme family dysfunction, Danish filmmaker Anders Thomas Jensen and his favorite leading man Mads Mikkelsen return with the deceptively generic “Riders of Justice.”
Mikkelsen, who also stars in “Another Round,” the recent Oscar winner for best international feature film, plays the stoical Markus, a recently deployed career soldier who abruptly returns home from Estonia to take down the biker gang believed to be responsible for an act of sabotage that resulted in the death of his wife.
The California Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as
For his first feature in a directorial capacity, British actor David Oyelowo, working from Emily A. Needell’s screenplay, embarked on a fantastical adventure fueled by real-world tribulations. The end result, “The Water Man,” while not altogether graceless, registers as tonally disjointed and ultimately inconsequential in spite of its star-fronted cast.
New in a small American town, Gunner (Lonnie Chavis), an imaginative teenage boy working on an intriguing graphic novel, learns his mother (a stupendous Rosario Dawson) is battling leukemia. Amos, the family’s military patriarch (Oyelowo in an adequate role), finds his son’s interests odd, thus their communication suffers.