Review: "Eye in the Sky"

In Director Gavin Hood's excellent thriller, Eye in the Sky, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flies over Kenya, where a secret meeting is taking place between members of al-Shabaab. The drone pilot (Aaron Paul) sits comfortably at a computer terminal, monitoring their actions from thousands of miles away at a Nevada air base. On the ground in Nairobi, a resourceful agent (Barkhad Abdi from Captain Phillips) uses smaller devices --disguised as birds or insects-- to obtain better camera angles. The footage travels around the world to a U.S. base in Hawaii, where a facial recognition expert confirms the identities of the meeting participants, and to England, where a British colonel (Helen Mirren) orders Kenyan forces to move in and capture the targets.

Review: "RED 2"

Staying retired and leaving his old life behind hasn't exactly been easy for ex-CIA operative Frank Moses (Bruce Willis). Of course, it doesn't help that the government keeps trying to kill him for things that he did -- in the service of his country -- decades ago. This time, it's a Cold War era mystery-project called "Nightshade" that has him marked for death once again.

Picking up a few months after the events of the first film, RED 2 reunites Frank and his girlfriend Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) with their paranoid brother-in-arms Marvin (John Malkovich). The three of them are on the run from a trio of dangerous agents: Jack Horton (Neal McDonough), a government spook assigned to tie up loose ends from "Nightshade;" wetwork specialist Victoria (Helen Mirren), an ally from the first film, has been given a contract by MI-6 to eliminate them this time around; and Han Jo-Bae (Lee Byung-Hun), a world-class assassin who's also hot on Frank's trail for both personal and professional reasons. Along the way, the gang will need help from some over-the-top characters: an information-dealing Brit nicknamed The Frog (David Thewlis); Edward Baily (Anthony Hopkins), a formerly-brilliant scientist locked in a London nut house; and Katja (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a Russian ex-KGB agent who shares a past with Frank.