Viggo Mortensen

Crimes of the Future

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Caprice stands over a lying Tenser

David Cronenberg likes the title Crimes of the Future. He’s used it once before, for a film he made in 1970. He’s using it again here, 52 years later, but there’s no other connection between the two, at least on the surface. The 1970 is comedy sci-fi about a world without women, the 2022 recycling is good old-fashioned Cronenbergian body horror like he used to make. FYI, eXistenZ (1999), his last go at the genre he dominated in the 1980s and 90s, also had the working title Crimes of the Future. This Crimes of the Future’s origins go back to four years after eXistenZ, when Cronenberg was trying to put together a film … Read more

Falling

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Dad rages at John

Lance Henriksen has built a career on genre movies in which he was required to do little more than turn up and be Lance Henriksen – a big growling badass. It’s great to see him doing some actual acting, which is what he’s called on to do in Falling, a movie written and directed by Viggo Mortensen, who co-stars. Henriksen is the dad whose creeping dementia means he’s now increasingly reliant on his son, John (Mortensen), which is awkward for both of them since dad Willis (Henriksen) is a raging homophobe who can just about keep it in check… and John is married to a man (Terry Chen). Dad is now in the … Read more

A Perfect Murder

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Gwyneth Paltrow and Viggo Mortensen in A Perfect Murder

Andrew Davis has made something of a specialty of directing thrillers. He made Steven Seagal’s best film, Under Siege, and Chuck Norris’s best film too, Code of Silence. He’s also responsible for the breathless chase of The Fugitive and for this remake of Frederick Knott’s play Dial M for Murder, on which Hitchcock based his 1954 movie. The “perfect murder”, beloved of films of a certain vintage, now seems almost as dated a concept as that of the criminal mind. However Davis and adapter Patrick Smith Kelly squeeze a little more mileage out of it by playing up what you might call the Gordon Gecko aspects – cash and deceit. Which brings us … Read more