Thriller
Send Help is an unbelievably effective look at two people pushed to extremes, with director Sam Raimi’s visual bombast not just enhancing, but powering this story of two people circling each other until only one remains.
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Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is everything I hoped this release would be—actually, it was more than I hoped it would be.
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You Can’t Run Forever is an exercise in frustration cinema. It’s one of those movies that makes you scream obvious solutions at the screen that the movie itself presents and refuses to use in order to pad out the running time. The script, co-written by Carolyn Carpenter and director Michelle Schumacher, takes a thin premise […]
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The trouble with David Fincher’s seminal 1995 horror thriller Se7en is that it spawned all the knockoffs. Its “serial killer taunts detectives” trope isn’t a new thing by any stretch of the imagination (reminder: Se7en was only four years separated from another linchpin detective procedural, The Silence of the Lambs), but in the words of […]
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What an irresistible, damning blast of a conceit I.S.S. executes in thrilling fashion. Nick Shafir’s script, appearing on the 2020 Black List well before the current Russia/Ukraine war, posits one simple conflict that bears so many implications on humanity itself: What if the US and Russian astronauts aboard the International Space Station watched war break […]
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When the trailer for M3GAN smashed onto the internet in October 2022, it was an immediate hit. A story about a life-size AI doll charged with protecting an orphaned child from anything, including other kids? And it also danced? There was nothing that social media didn’t love about it, turning shot sequences from the trailer […]
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All you acrophobics in the audience right now who can’t even stand talking about heights need to turn away now. I appreciate you clicking on the link, but I do not wish to cause any discomfort. This opening paragraph is all you’ll get as far as a grace period. So here we go in 5… […]
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Let me get this out of the way: I have no attachments to the previous incarnations of Firestarter – neither Stephen King’s 1980 novel nor the 1984 filmed adaptation – in particular. The book was one of the first of his that I ever read, but I barely remember anything from it; I didn’t see […]
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Hunting Daze : Movie Review
One does not just sit down to take writer/director Annick Blanc’s feature debut Hunting Daze (original title: Jour de chasse) as just another movie; it is truly a bewildering, unsettling, angering, at times distasteful, and utterly beguiling experience. There’s no artifice, no gussying it up; what Blanc wants to show us in the little microcosm […]
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