​Irish playwrights and auteurs Martin and John Michael McDonagh have been responsible for some of the most memorable morality plays to hit theaters in recent years.  John Michael’s Calvary is a definitive ‘good man in a fallen world’ post-recession tale, and Martin’s In Bruges resuscitated Colin Farrell’s career on its way to cult status.  Of the two brothers, Martin experienced the McDonagh family’s greatest success with his roiling hit Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.  An angry film for angry times, Martin McDonagh turns tragedy into righteous fury and blinkered obsession, while taking stabs at a conservative flavor of political correctness that praises figures of authority and state power.  There’s also grace in the small Ozark town at the film’s center, but its inhabitants have too many excuses to shun it.  Three Billboards is complicated and conflicting and often times at odds with itself.  McDonagh’s utilizing some raw power in a less-than airtight film.

​Only apple pie and John Denver come close to being as quintessentially American as guns, and “Free Fire” gives us plenty of two out of three. The night before watching “FF” I watched the first “John Wick” (because I’m often late to some parties); a highly stylized action movie with plenty of action and gun violence. I enjoyed it very much. But the violence in “Wick” was so coordinated and scripted, as it should be, that it left no illusions that it was comic book fantasy. Two shots to the gut, one to the head. Bam. That’s the assassin’s signature in movies and books.

​Carolco Pictures went from producing the Rambo series, Basic Instinct, and Terminator 2 to losing the 2017 equivalent of $147 million on Cutthroat Island, incidentally the last film they released before declaring bankruptcy.  Of course, there’s often a wide distance between commercial and critical success.  A film can be a masterpiece and a complete flop, or make a lot of money while being a piece of shit.  The failure on one side does not guarantee failure on the other.  This is not the case with Cutthroat Island.  Though it’s surprising that it was such a flop, as it at least looks like it could fool enough people with a decent poster or a trailer that cuts out most of the dialogue, Renny Harlin’s swashbuckling disaster is disgraceful and amateurish.  It is good and right that people lost their jobs after putting their seal of approval on Cutthroat Island.