GRAND PIANO (2013) movie review

Grand Piano (2013) d. Eugenio Mira (Spain)

Returning to the stage for the first time in five years, former wunderkind concert pianist Tom Selznick (Elijah Wood) is wrestling with an understandable case of stage fright. But with his glam actress wife (Kerry Bishé) looking on from the opera box, he’s poised to make a grand success (recovering from his last disastrous public appearance, where he blew the crucial climax of the “Unplayable Sonata”) until he turns a page in his musical score mid-concert to find a red-pen-scribbled note: “Play one wrong note and you die.” Soon, the red dot of a laser-sighted rifle is dancing alongside his fingertips, while a menacing voice (John Cusack) via earpiece goads him toward perfection. But why?

THE RAVEN (2012) movie review

Raven, The (2012) (1st viewing) d. McTeigue, James

“John Cusack is Edgar Allan Poe” isn’t really that great of a tagline, but when you couple it with “from the director of V for Vendetta” and a reasonably thorny narrative following a serial killer who seems to be both taunting and drawing inspiration from the infamously troubled scribbler, well, things get a little more appealing. Screenwriting team Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare’s fanciful and fictionalized telling of Poe’s final days does have its memorable moments of suspense and grisly payoff, particularly when focusing on the murders themselves as Cusack throws himself wholeheartedly into the role of amateur detective, especially once his lovely fiancée Alice Eve becomes a pawn in the game. Purists be damned, I thought it was all right.