Films featuring
Pete Postlethwaite

The Town

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Let me be up front and say that Ben Affleck isn’t my favorite actor, especially when he’s not working for Kevin Smith. Somehow, he often seems out of his depth when he tries to stretch himself too far beyond that Good Will Hunting earnestness. Only two features into his directorial career, however, I’m quickly becoming a fan of his work behind the camera. We’ll see how he does when he moves outside the comfort zone of the Boston crime story, but maybe he shouldn’t bother. John Ford stuck mostly to westerns, and he did all right.

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Dark Water

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In most of the places that I’ve lived, a water-stain on the ceiling is not scary. Annoying, yes; disgusting, absolutely, but I’ve never had the feeling that it was trying to kill me.

It was in that mindset that I first saw the previews to Dark Water. My initial instinct was quite cynical. Ooooh, dirty water! That’s so scaaary!

Okay, so I was wrong, which is, by itself, not exactly a newsworthy event. Dark Water is an effective, if predictable, supernatural thriller. Continue reading

The Constant Gardener

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When a film goes out of its way to portray an entire industry as the epitome of rapacious evil, barely two steps above drowning orphans in a river, you have to at least speculate that the filmmakers might be stacking the deck a little in favor of one side of the argument. Fortunately, The Constant Gardener works quite well on the level of a pure thriller, so you can accept for two hours that its heroes need their corrupt pharmaceutical companies like Luke Skywalker needed Darth Vader.

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