jason patric

MK Ultra

by
Anson Mount as Dr Strauss

If the title MK Ultra means something to you already, you’ll know what this movie is about – the CIA’s MKUltra program, mind-control experiments on unwilling, ignorant or forced volunteers (soldiers, prisoners, prostitutes) using LSD and other drugs, often psychotics or psychedelics. There were various aims but one of them was the creation of the perfect soldier, one who would obey orders without thinking. What’s odd and bold about writer/director Joseph Sorrentino’s fictionalised retelling of the story is how unsensational he makes it considering the historical facts – the experiments were entirely illegal and secret and only came to light in the 1970s. Sorrentino’s preamble tells us the program got up and running … Read more

The Vanished

by
Thomas Jane, Anne Heche and Jason Patric

The Vanished stars three names who used to keep casting directors’ phones busy. Anne Heche, Thomas Jane and Jason Patric all bring a useful intensity to an incredibly wayward kidnap drama written by Peter Facinelli, whose face you’ll probably know (from the Twilight films, or Supergirl or Nurse Jackie on TV) even if you don’t quite recognise the name. It’s a simple whodunit, in many ways, loaded up with paranoia, and kicking off in a trailer park that’s largely deserted, on account of it being Thanksgiving weekend, where married couple Wendy (Heche) and Paul (Jane) rock up in their RV with their daughter for a family camping weekend. What with the film being … Read more

Your Friends and Neighbors

by
Aaron Eckhart, Ben Stiller and Jason Patric in Your Friends & Neighbors

Like writer/director LaBute’s In The Company of Men, his 1997 debut, Your Friends and Neighbors deals with a theme that’s current in cinema – that all men are rubbish. LaBute focuses on three self-obsessed friends, travelling further into their psyches as the film progresses. And the further he travels, the shallower the trio appear. Contemporary gents, LaBute appears to be saying, have benefited enormously from the liberalising cultural shift of the 1960s, but these days instead of being high, they’re more high and dry. For some people this film might be a bit preachy, a bit speechy, and it’s true that LaBute’s origins as a writer for the stage seem fairly evident. Perhaps the … Read more