QUEEN & SLIM

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Roll the dice. Dig the groovy vibe of this stunning independent gem. Think Bonnie and Clyde, but with a lot more style, sex, attitude, and daringness. Surprises just keep coming through the lives of American characters so lived in, you’ll swear you’re part of the adventure.

Director Melina Matsoukas (a two-time Grammy winner) throws down like a motherfucker in bringing scriptwriter Lena Waithe’s brilliant screenplay to dynamic life. Casting plays a significant part in this film’s overwhelming success as an example of truly inspired Cinema. Marvel has nothing on Melina Matsoukas.

Daniel Kaluuya (Jordan Peele’s “Get Out”) is remarkably charismatic as Slim, a regular guy who gets caught in a deadly confrontation with an Ohio police officer. Jodie Turner-Smith is off the charts as Queen, an attorney sticking to Slim like glue after surviving the couple’s roadside encounter with a racist cop. Kaluuya and Turner-Smith enjoy an undeniable sexual onscreen chemistry that fires suspenseful twists and turns for our couple on the run. You'll be on the edge of your seat. And yes, "Queen & Slim" rates as great pick for a date movie if you're in the mood to get some. 

“Queen & Slim” embodies America's laundry list of racial social injustice as part of the overall fabric of the story at its heart, a love story. I promise you’ll love this movie. Spoiler alert, the window jumping scene will put your heart in your throat. Wow.   

Rated R. 132 mins. 

LET THE CORPSES TAN

       Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

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The narrative is appropriately thin in this wildly inspired homage to European crime action movie tropes of the ’70 (think “Zabriskie Point”). As a result, “Let the Corpses Tan” plays better as a retro art instillation piece or as a film you could project on a giant party screen for revelers to get wasted as they engage in all types of sexual misconduct.

Nonetheless, Belgian writing/directing duo Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani (“The Strange Color of You”) wring a lot of movie out of their “genre” (low budget) exploration.

Although it sports one of the most incendiary film titles in recent memory, “Let the Corpses Tan” is too one-note to hold your interest for its 92 minutes regardless of how much fetishistic attention is paid to every gritty detail involving a stand-off between gangsters in a remote dusty seaside location.

The filmmakers revel in playing tricks with your eyes as when, what seems to be, an overhead shot of the location’s compound is overrun with [seemingly giant] ants. Sure it’s all style with not much substance but that’s the point. If you’re in the mood for virtuosic visual panache involving machine guns, gold, cars, motorcycles, fire, smoke, and blood, then you’re in business.   

Not Rated. 92 mins.

BULLET TO THE HEAD

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Audiences drawn to a movie with such an obvious title as “Bullet to the Head” will get every line of cheesy dialogue, intelligence-defying plot-point, and trashy titillation they’re after in this foreshadowed misfire. The saddest part is that Walter Hill — the director behind such cinematic touchstones as “The Warriors” (1979) and “48 Hrs” (1982) — is exposed as a pale shadow of his former self.

The script version of Alexis Nolent’s graphic novel “Du plomb dans la tete” isn’t so much written as squeezed from an overripe pustule. Although Alessandro Camon ("The Messenger") is credited for the final product, other uncredited writers put their muddy fingerprints all over the version we see up on the screen.

Sylvester Stallone barely breaks a sweat as New Orleans hitman Jimmy Bobo. Jimmy goes on the rampage after his assassin partner Louis (Jon Seda) gets offed by a blade-carrying thug (Jason Momoa) when the two men walk into the wrong bar after completing a bloody assignment. A zip-drive MacGuffin baits Jimmy and his newly introduced two-faced cop pal Detective Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang). An on-set acting coach could have helped Kang, whose performance is nothing short of excruciating.

An extraneous subplot involving Jimmy’s tattoo-artist-daughter Lisa (Sarah Shahi) ebbs and flows as the story lurches through action predictable set pieces. The film’s cartoonish mano-y-mano battle sequence — involving axes — arrives as too little too late.

You might think that the crime action genre would have evolved by now considering the great examples created by such visionaries as Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson. But you’d be wrong.

Rated R. 91 mins.