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Jan 14, 2025 | 
forcesofgeek.com | Will McGuire
Fans of action cinema and boutique Blu-ray alike were stunned to read in Variety that the Golden Princess (GP) library of titles was acquired for worldwide distribution by Shout! Studios, one of the premiere labels for high quality physical media releases.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
forcesofgeek.com | Will McGuire
The Hunted has an incredible pedigree: William Friedkin was, with the exception of Michael Mann, the most accomplished director of procedural thrillers in American film. Tommy Lee Jones playing an emotionally conflicted specialist chasing a murderer against his better judgment and Benecio del Toro as a sympathetic villain who has been destroyed by vast societal forces and is lashing out.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
forcesofgeek.com | Will McGuire
Pulp Fiction is 30 years old and it feels like a cultural document from the future, not the past. It is an evergreen film: it has not only survived a generation’s worth of trends and changing tastes but has retained its power from among a legion of imitators. It did for American cinema what Hemingway did for its prose fiction seventy years earlier: blended bold style with a lively poetry in ordinary speech that set a new standard for how alive our fictional characters could seem.
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Dec 25, 2024 | 
forcesofgeek.com | Will McGuire
Written by Mark EdlitzForeword by Bruce Feirstein Independently Published“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.
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Dec 25, 2024 | 
forcesofgeek.com | Will McGuire
Very few films evoke both the virtues of commercial American filmmaking in the 70’s and New York City pre-Giuliani as strongly as Joseph Sargent’s 1974 thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. This detail rich and perfectly paced thriller continually makes me nostalgic for a time and place I never experienced firsthand.
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Dec 25, 2024 | 
forcesofgeek.com | Will McGuire
The Searchers is one of the five best films produced by the American studio system during the Golden Age of Hollywood. It remains, along with fellow John Wayne vehicle Rio Bravo, the most beloved and best remembered of the epic widescreen Technicolor westerns of the 1950’s and the purest distillation of why these films worked.
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
forcesofgeek.com | Will McGuire
M. Night Shyamalan is a director I tend to root for. In a world of franchise pictures and prestige horror, he’s doing high concept thrillers with a strong authorial voice. I don’t like everything in his filmography, but when I saw the trailer for Trap it felt like a natural return to form for Philly’s Hitchcock. Josh Hartnett plays a serial killer who’s barely holding it together when he discovers the pop concert he’s taken his daughter to is an elaborate trap to catch him.
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
forcesofgeek.com | Will McGuire
North by Northwest is one of the best known and best loved films by arguably the most famous film director of all time, Alfred Hitchcock. You know it’s good. I know it’s good. Tribesmen in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea know it is good. What’s worth talking about in this space is what makes North by Northwest, made at the height of Hitchcock’s commercial power and artistic freedom, uniquely engaging in Hitchock’s immense filmography of classics, and how it informs filmmaking now.
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
forcesofgeek.com | Will McGuire
A Simple Plan is a homespun noir, a film about the monsters that dwell within ordinary people when expectations outstrip reality. It focuses on the slow, gut-wrenching realization that you don’t really know the people closest to you, and the horrifying idea that even the deepest bonds of familial love can be severed by a simple twist of fate.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
forcesofgeek.com | Will McGuire
Mike Flanagan’s 2016 Hush feels like a cinematic exercise to create the purest thriller possible: a collection of set pieces with minimal dialogue and a logical progression built on keeping the audience in suspense for as much of the film as possible. The film scales back the slasher film to its bare essentials and, in the process, ably demonstrates why anyone would be excited to see a vulnerable protagonist get terrorized for an hour and a half in the first place.
