![]() ![]() Unfortunately, Harlow doesn’t have access to any of his belongings while he’s in solitary, not even a sharpened pencil, so filing an appeal will take some doing. An anxious secretary (Jessa Zarubica) informs him that his assets have been seized, so his appeal for a new trial must be re-submitted with a public defender. The camera pushes in on Harlow slowly as he, standing between two sets of guard doors, learns that his lawyers have just dropped his case. ![]() Drama - R | 1h 52min | Drama | 5 February 2021 (USA) The claustrophobic prison movie “Caged” begins with its most original and upsetting scene: wrongfully convicted prisoner Harlow Reid (Edi Gathegi) calls and fails to get through to his lawyer right before he’s forced into solitary confinement. cinematography, and an effective score, but one could say that it’s the little things that hold it back. ![]() Some of the major stuff here works, including a performance from Washington that’s better than the movie around it (yet again), some striking L.A. It’s a movie that’s constantly on the verge of developing into something as intense and haunting as writer/director John Lee Hancock wants it to be, but it never achieves its goals, especially in its final half-hour. That’s part of what makes “The Little Things” feel dated, although the way it recalls better films with similar themes, particularly David Fincher’s “Seven,” does it no favors too. In recent years, this genre has largely become the product of television, as shows like “True Detective” and “Mindhunter” have taken on stories of men haunted by the crimes they investigate. In the wake of the success of “The Silence of the Lambs,” there seemed to be a dark, brooding thriller adaptation every week with titles like “Kiss the Girls” and “The Bone Collector,” and it felt like half of them starred Denzel Washington. “ Movies like “The Little Things” feel like a vanishing breed. The parallels would be too forced the symbolism, too obvious. Western intelligence agencies respond to his offer with the least suspicious candidate they can find for the role of intermediary and courier, an engineer and businessman who has traveled frequently to Eastern Europe, but never to the Soviet Union.= ||| ✤ Syinopsis :: Thriller - Ironbark (original title) Cold War spy Greville Wynne and his Russian source try to put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis.It sounds painfully mawkish if not downright implausible on the page: a woman, paralyzed from the chest down in a freak accident, finds hope and determination in caring for an injured bird. The missiles haven’t begun their fateful journey to Castro’s Cuba-the film’s timeline grows increasingly vague-but Penkovsky is so alarmed by emanations from the Kremlin that he risks his life by offering to divulge state secrets. The narrative begins two years earlier, with a simulated news clip of Nikita Khrushchev, the volatile Soviet leader, giving a bellicose speech in front of a Moscow audience that includes Penkovsky. Those events, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, brought civilization to the brink of nuclear holocaust. But this story of intersecting destinies is oddly self-miniaturizing, its drama dwarfed for a long stretch of time by the titanic significance of events playing out off-screen. Cumberbatch clearly suffered for his art in order to portray the terrible punishment his character endured. Benedict Cumberbatch is Greville Wynne, a British civilian recruited by MI6 and the CIA to travel to Moscow and make covert contact with Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), a Soviet military intelligence colonel who wants to help the West avoid a shooting war. Such is the case with “The Courier,” opening in theaters, an earnest spy thriller based on a true story and set in the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War. And a worse sign still when the genre itself seems more remote from current concerns than it deserves to be. It is not a good sign when a film keeps evoking superior examples of its genre.
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