Before and After (1996)

When their teenage son is suspected of murder, Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, as the boy's parents, must grapple with small-town police friends, lawyers, vigilantes, and their own feelings of culpability over covering up the crime, in Barbet Schroeder's earnest but a touch too pat adaptation of Rosellen Brown's book.

★★★☆☆

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In The Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

Patriot Games also pitted an IRA terrorist against a hero who makes the mistake of killing the terrorist's brother, but this movie transports the story to an unlikely setting, a tiny coastal village of Ireland where it can be hard for viewers to believe that the two parties - Liam Neeson's brother-killing hero Finbar Murphy and Kerry Condon as the terrorist and sister of the man killed -  don't immediately find each other and have it out; the unbelievable delay is to allow the movie to build to a melodramatic - and a little out-of-place in a small Irish village - John Woo finale where the town suddenly has the population density amd proportions of a major city.

★★★☆☆

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Marlowe (2022)

Tricky dicky dialogue at the start that has characters answering questions with questions in a fast prattle and repetitive circle ("What would you say, Mr Marlowe, if I said you said I said...?" sort of talk) makes Neil Jordan's adaptation of John Banville's book start out feeling like a spoof of the hard-boiled detective novel, but it's not and is in fact, eventually, a beautiful-to-look-at period crime story featuring Raymond Chandler's flatfoot Philip Marlowe, played by a perfectly hangdog, trenchcoated, fedora-ed Liam Neeson, investigating a case of a missing Lothario in 1920s Los Angeles, but some problems along the way take you out of the drama - Alan Cunmmings' overacting, for one, and a nebulous mystery that keeps going around and around on the spot, much like that fast Neil Jordan prattle.

★★★★☆

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The Marksman (2021)

Liam Neeson's Jim, a war veteran protecting a Mexican boy from a ruthless drug cartel, sports a circle of orange foundation on his face, reports the "I.A.s" he finds crossing his Arizona property towards the border, and takes advantage of Donald Trump's relaxed approach to gun ownership, and given all this, you'd suspect this 2021 action thriller had something political to say, but the audience is made to sit through decidedly unpolitical and unscintillating things once this movie's thin premise is set up and the man and boy are racing by car across America pursued by the cartel - things like (1) the purchase of an atlas at a gas station (2) a stop at a diner for a meal (3) a toilet break (4) an overnight trip to buy pop tarts, and when things really start to get exciting (5) the ex-Marine surprises the kid with a bag of gummi bears - so, it is only in the last twenty minutes that the criminals, grown tired of spending such a long time tracking all these credit card purchases along Route 66, finally catch up to this dreary pair of roadtrippers and bring the movie to an end with the idea that in America you have the freedom to blow your brains out.

★☆☆☆☆

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Cold Pursuit (2019)

In the township of Kehoe in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, against a backdrop of five-metre snows and glacial waterfalls, a snowplow driver seeks grisly revenge on those responsible for his son's death, and as in Harry Brown - because that's who this unlikely vigilante reminds you of, a snowplow-driving Harry Brown - there's a grim satisfaction to be gotten from watching smug druglords receiving their comeuppance from an unlikely avenger, but the movie makes you contend with a snowstorm of Fargo-style detail -the background details and idiosyncracies of oddball characters - that for the middle two-thirds of the movie, sends the plot and fun into hibernation.

★★☆☆☆

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The Next Three Days (2010)

In this American remake of Pour Elle (Anything for Her), Russell Crowe plays a college professor who decides to break his wife, convicted of murder, out of jail and luckily for him, he has what feels like an eternity - the film's two hours and thirty-three minute runtime - to do it and it turns out to be a rather simple matter of cutting a phone line and doing a letter switcheroo, so turn off your brains and content yourself with the college professor's reality free of inconvenient details.

★★★☆☆

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Taken 2 (2012)

Liam Neeson is good in these Secret Service agent slash loving family guy roles, so its no wonder the Taken series got a sequel, but this is pretty rudimentary stuff with only headache-inducing, not thrilling, action sequences (so frenetically filmed you can only give up caring what is happening) and more than excusable amounts of idiocy as the heroic American family do things like let off hand grenades across Istanbul as a means of triangulating their location, and plotting thin and often discombobulating with one character left unconscious on a concrete floor behind enemy lines for a long stretch but who is in a later scene is flippantly described as "Okay" - and, anyway, it is surely not a good sign in these kinds of movies if you find yourself not caring much if the family survive or not.

★★☆☆☆

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Widows (2018)

Lynda La Plante's crime soap, a book previously made into a British tv series and now, here, a star-studded American blockbuster, ends up feeling like its story of gangster wives, forced to do a 'job' after the death of their husbands, overreaches in its attempts to be a sprawling epic because while its flourishes - race and gender politics, personal trauma, relationship angst - are interesting, none seems warranted given the heist at the core of the movie ends up being a home robbery requiring the widows to climb some stairs and make sure first that no-one is home.

★★★☆☆

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The Commuter (2018)

A daily commute on a surburban train is rendered even more mindless for an insurance salesman (and ex-cop) when a woman approaches him mid-journey with a harebrained proposal - enjoying the ensuing ridiculously plotted action aboard the train requires you to leave your mind at the departing station. 

★★☆☆☆

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A Walk Among The Tombstones (2014)

There are references to Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade in this neo-noir mystery starring Liam Neeson, but there are also touches of Sherlock Holmes in Neeson's recovering substance abuser and dogged sleuth, Matthew Scudder — especially given the presence at his side of a Baker Street Boy, TJ, who helps the Luddite gumshoe with tech matters — but while Scudder is like a gritty contemporary Sherlock Holmes, the crimes he investigates are Thomas Harris Silence of the Lambs ones and this is where the problem lies in a movie that is two disparate halves — one half investigation procedural, the other half unbearably sick torture porn.

★★★☆☆

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Taken 3 (2014)

The dopiest moments in this appalling third movie of the Taken series include a scene in which a peach yoghurt drink plays a dubious role in ex-government operative Bryan Mills' intricate plot to reunite with his daughter; a scene involving a Russian gang leader who makes a money-exchange appointment, barking down a phone, "Meet me in an hour," and is then in the very next scene seen raunching it up in a spa with two bikini-clad women - you can imagine him hissing, "We need to be quick!" (and watch as the women vanish without trace when the appointment starts and guns start blazing); and any scene involving Forest Whitaker's helpful-unhelpful-helpful-unhelpful investigator who in place of purpose and personality sports a chess piece and an elastic band.

★☆☆☆☆

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Excalibur (1981)

This fantasy adventure tells the story of King Arthur (and Merlin, Camelot, the Lady of the Lake, Sir Gawain, Morgana, and the Knights of the Round Table...) and is much more captivating on its 1981 film budget than more recent sfx-driven Hollywood extravaganzas, helped enormously by its being studded with big-name British superstars-in-the-making like Helen Mirren, Patrick Stewart and Liam Neeson, who all loan a Shakespearean weight to proceedings.

★★★★☆

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Husbands and Wives (1992)

From their apartments to their workplaces, and in cafes and at parties, a foursome of New Yorkers talk neurotically about sex, fidelity and marriage, men and women, but this is not Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, but Gabe and Judy, Sally and Jack, two couples in Woody Allen's hilarious 1992 comedy, who are all rocked by the latter pair's decision to separate.

★★★★★

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Silence (2016)

In the 1600s, Portugese Jesuit priests head to Japan where Christians are being persecuted and one of their own, true-life historical figure Cristovao Ferreira is missing-in-missionary-action, in Martin Scorsese's epic and looong treatment of Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel about the effect Christianity and Japan have on each other.

★★★★☆

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Love Actually (2003)

This saccharine romantic comedy is replayed on television about three times a week and I've grown to loathe it, but at least on the first occasion it is a pleasure, featuring an ensemble all-star cast in a series of interconnected stories that share the central theme of messy love.

★★★★☆

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Non-Stop (2014)

Liam Neeson does his Taken tough guy act again in this ridiculous but fun Die Hard-esque action thriller set aboard an international flight which has found itself at the mercy of a mysterious...phone texter!

★★★☆☆

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Unknown (2011)

Unknown starts intriguingly, a bit like Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (an American in Europe suffers a head injury and then isn't believed) and ends excitingly, a bit like Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (a race against the clock to prevent an assassination attempt at a gathering of prominent world figures), but the stretch in between is too run-of-the-mill for too long, keeping this from being a suspense action great.

★★★☆☆

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