The Skolney Blog

1995: The Usual Suspects is on every list of all-time great movie endings. I mean, spoiler alert for a 30 year old movie, but when it is revealed that our film's ostensible narrator, the meek cripple Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) was actually the story's unseen boogeyman uber villain Keyser Soze all along, it is stunning. I saw this in theaters, and there were literal gasps. It weirdly has come to overshadow the movie as a whole. People kind of forget what an absolute banger of a film this is, with an airtight screenplay and a terrific ensemble of largely character actors all in career peaks. A seemingly random collection of rather small-time criminals get thrown into a police lineup together. They wind up teaming up to do some higher profile crimes, which bring them across the aforementioned Soze. Everything that happened is recounted in the police station by Spacey to a police detective (Chazz Palminteri). We know that basically every character that we meet early in ...

In theaters: THE NAKED GUN Did we need a reboot/legacy sequel to one of the absolute all-time classic comedies? No. But as a joke delivery machine, this still delivers a lot of laughs. Liam Neeson is fun, and Pamela Anderson's career resurgence continues with a game comedic performance.  WEAPONS The summer's biggest sleeper hit, this one hooks you with a terrific, mysterious premise involving missing children. And the mystery carries the film far. But oftentimes it's when the mystery is revealed that these films lose their oomph. Here, however, once we know the truth it actually gets arguably MORE fun, and climaxes with a finale that is genuinely hilarious.  HONEY DON'T A very frustrating film. The 2nd collaboration between Ethan Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke, after the pretty entertaining Drive Away Dolls, seems to have all the pieces in place to be another snappy fun crime caper. Quirky characters, a good cast (Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans), talent beh...