214 Best Releases From the Genre Crime (Page 6)
Nitram
SimilarAnna and the King (1999), Brubaker (1980), Freedom Writers (2007), Mississippi Burning (1988), The Pursuit of Happyness (2006),
Justin Kurzel’s Nitram rarely features violence. Instead, it’s often subdued in anger, existing in long stretches of loneliness and isolation. The tone follows its lead, played by a phenomenal Caleb Landry Jones. He wanders through a small Australian town without friends or steady way to spend his time outside of fireworks. He exists in a muted state of prolonged sadness, taking enough medication to dampen his emotions. He's unable to make any lasting relationships. Kurzel’s film, based on the 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, simmers towards an inevitable conclusion, constructing and examining the events leading to a tragedy, frightening in its intimacy. Continue Reading →
Tirez sur le pianiste
“The voice you hear is not my speaking voice,” Ada (Holly Hunter) explains in The Piano’s opening voiceover. It is her “mind’s voice” explaining that she has been mute since she was six and no one, not even she knows why. There is no medical explanation, so those around her think her silence grows from sheer will, that she is determined and refuses to bend. She can only communicate through sign language, which has to be translated by her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), or through notes written on a small notepad she keeps around her neck. Yet, she doesn’t think of herself as silent; she has her piano. The music she has studied her entire life has become her form of communication, her way of making noise and announcing herself to the world around her. But, as soon as she lands in New Zealand and enters her new life as the bride of a farmer, she is separated from her piano–it is simply too large to carry from the beach to her new home with her husband. She arrives in her new world voiceless, deprived of her primary means of expression. Continue Reading →
The Prank
The living legend's vicious physics teacher is the only part of this dark comedy to make the grade.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 South by Southwest Festival)
Between the release of a documentary celebrating her long and amazing career and her scene-stealing supporting turn in Spielberg’s adaptation of West Side Story, Rita Moreno definitely had a 2021 for the pop culture ages. Alas, that undeniably welcome career resurgence hits a major hurdle in The Prank, an unspeakably lame mystery-comedy-horror hybrid that director Maureen Bharoocha seemingly devised to answer the question, “What if we took Teaching Mrs. Tingle but made it even stupider?” The result may not be the single worst film in this year’s somewhat lackluster SXSW lineup, but it’s close. Continue Reading →
Windfall
SimilarCrouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000),
Watch afterNightmare Alley (2021),
Without any awareness of the Hitchcockian tag—impossible, what with it being The Point in the marketing, but let’s try—Windfall is the best advert yet for Ojai, California. Right from the get-go, director and co-writer Charlie McDowell serenely guides viewers around a gorgeous hacienda with an Eden of Pixie tangerines and the Topatopa within eyeshot. In short, this is a fetching property, easily bearing a price tag in the millions. It’s an item someone in the style of our unofficial tour guide (Jason Segel), a daring blend of off-duty Sheriff Hopper and the designer-disheveled-ism of modern tech bros, would possess. Or maybe host the Roys if they are to reattempt family therapy. Continue Reading →
Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives.
The story of Sarma Melngailis seems tailor-made for tabloid headlines. The former queen of New York’s vegan scene went on the run after embezzling millions of dollars and stiffing employees and investors. A year later she was captured after the police traced an order she made to the emphatically un-vegan Domino’s pizza. Continue Reading →
Rrushe
“We had a tree in our yard with a palace in the branches. It was built for my sister and it had fairy lights that went on and off in a sequence. She was the princess. It was her tree, she wouldn’t let me up it. At night the darkness frightens me. Someone could be watching from behind them, someone who wishes you harm. I used to imagine the roots of that tree crawling, crawling right under the house, right under my bed. Maybe that’s why trees scare me. It’s like they have hidden powers.” - Sweetie's opening lines Continue Reading →
The Thing About Pam
NetworkNBC,
SimilarStar-Crossed Lovers,
The thing about The Thing About Pam is that there’s no thing there. Tonally run amuck, the limited series is a whimsical take on a deadly serious story that can’t come to grips with its darkness. There are moments to enjoy, but overall the series does little to prove itself necessary. There’s a lot of play happening, but little of it is constructive. Continue Reading →
The Batman
SimilarDie Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), Hitman (2007), Mississippi Burning (1988),
Primal Fear (1996) Secret Window (2004), The Departed (2006),
Watch afterDoctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021),
The opening shot of Matt Reeves' The Batman evokes, if nothing else, the opening shot of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation: we peer, ominously, through the binoculars of an unseen voyeur, looking at a young boy in a red ninja outfit playing with his father in a Gotham penthouse. While this isn't a flashback to young Bruce Wayne -- rather, we see Gotham's tough-on-crime Mayor Mitchell and his soon-to-be-orphaned boy -- the evocation is undeniable. By the time The Batman's three hours whiz past you, we'll have a similarly probing look into Bruce Wayne himself: what he prioritizes, what drives him, what he thinks he's doing for the city as Batman and what he realizes he should be doing. And it's that texture, that sense of interiority, that makes The Batman one of the best films of the year thus far, and one of the most fascinating cinematic adventures the character has to offer. Continue Reading →
The Endgame
For about five years, beginning in the late aughts and ending in the early teens, a favorite plot component emerged. Increasingly, the bad guy was getting captured about halfway through, and then it turning out it was. His. Plan. All. Along! Some, like The Dark Knight and Skyfall, used it to great effect. Others…less so. Continue Reading →
Death on the Nile
Studio20th Century Studios,
Even if you’re not familiar with Agatha Christie’s vast body of works—she wrote sixty-six detective novels alone—you’ve probably heard of Hercule Poirot. He’s the world’s most famous literary detective, next to Sherlock Holmes. Death on the Nile marks Kenneth Branagh’s second outing directing one of Christie’s Poirot stories and starring as the mustachioed detective himself, following 2017’s tepidly received Murder on the Orient Express. Dogged by COVID-19 delays and scandals surrounding star Armie Hammer, Death on the Nile sometimes feels like it’s scrambling to justify its own existence, and only half-succeeds. Continue Reading →
Breaking In
KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer.
Caper films are competitions. Outside of the obvious cops and robbers struggle, they, more importantly, dispute the value of things and who deserves to own them. While classically most capers are individuals vs institutions, there is a subgenre of capers that features an Odd Couple pair of thieves in a competitive mentorship and centers the push and pull between them.
Semi-recent entries like Entrapment (1999) and The Score (2001) are examples where the struggle between the thieves is a generational one with the old and new guards having to learn from each other. Couched within the larger struggles of value and property, these interpersonal battles between thieves play out an additional competition over cultural differences and ideas. Continue Reading →
Murderville
Murderville has a terrible premise. It’s a parody of police procedurals, but also involves improv comedy, performed mostly by actors not known for their improvisational skills. It sounds like forced laughs of the most uncomfortable kind, where the jokes are sparse and the flop sweat is flowing. It shouldn’t work at all. And yet, somehow, it not only works, it’s a genuine delight, and a respite from a relentlessly bleak season. Continue Reading →
Resurrection
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →
The Afterparty
Reunions can be murder. You’ve got to fool yourself into thinking you look as good or better than you did at 18. Then you have to draw to make that delusion reality. Clothes. A new haircut. Makeup. Perhaps a fun new accessory you can pretend has always been your thing. Then you get there. You see exes, people you hated who have the nerve to look great and be successful, and former classmates who remind you that you were kind of terrible as a teenager, too. Continue Reading →
The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window
At this point, the wine-soaked citizen detective has become its own genre. Adaptations of boilerplate mysteries like The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window give plenty of fodder for Netflix’s newest series: The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window starring Kristen Bell as the titular Woman. Of course, spoofs and parodies are all well and good. Considering that Netflix also produced Woman in the Window, though, this newest feels a bit like having your cake and eating it too. Continue Reading →
Breaking
A game cast can't save Abi Damaris Corbin's misguided, manipulative account of a real-life tragedy.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.)
In a long line of recent movies that are desperate to say something important about our society today, 892 takes an ideologically muddled approach to racial and social politics. Abi Damaris Corbin's film functions similarly in its structure and tone to a few other past Sundance offerings like Fran Kranz’s Mass and Gustav Möller’s The Guilty, a lot of it stemming from the use of a single location for the majority of the action. Unfortunately, 892 is the weakest of these movies, a limp social-issue thriller that suffers from an uncontrolled eagerness to say everything all at once. Continue Reading →
Ozark
SimilarBrimstone, Broadchurch, Jack the Ripper, Tientsin Mystic,
StudioMRC,
Previous seasons of Netflix’s Ozark followed Martin and Wendy Byrde’s (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) quest to survive death and prove their family’s worth to the cartel and their violent rivals. Now, in the fourth and final season, the Byrdes must figure out if they can survive without their dark, criminal lives. They sacrificed a lot to get to the top—but what would they sacrifice to stay there? Thanks to this ask and its answers, Ozark Season 4 Part 1 is slow-burn suspense at its finest, with the Byrde’s maneuvering to stay on top, no matter the personal costs. Continue Reading →
See for Me
SimilarBeverly Hills Cop (1984), Eyes Wide Shut (1999),
This review was originally written as part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival; we're reposting it now that the film is available in theaters and VOD. Continue Reading →
Search Party
NetworkHBO Max,
Similar'Allo 'Allo!, Rescue Me,
Watch afterLove, Death & Robots, MINDHUNTER, Riverdale, The End of the F***ing World,
The Expanse The Sopranos,
WandaVision
Search Party, the TBS-turned-HBO Max comedy from co-creators Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter, has never been afraid of reinventing itself. While it started off as a satire of New York millennials trying (and failing) to find their own identities, the show kept evolving and playing with so many genres — from whodunit to legal drama to abduction thriller — throughout its run. The fifth and final season is no different, except this time, the story has higher stakes and doubles down even more on what makes the show so fearless and wildly entertaining in the first place. Continue Reading →
Nightmare Alley
SimilarBasic Instinct (1992), Cube (1997), Cube Zero (2004), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), The Silent Partner (1978), Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995), Vertigo (1958),
Watch afterLicorice Pizza (2021), West Side Story (2021),
StarringWillem Dafoe,
StudioSearchlight Pictures,
Back in 1998, Gus Van Sant released his remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It wasn’t a good movie, but it provided two decent critical talking points. Firstly, was it actually a remake, or was it another adaptation of Robert Bloch’s novel? Given that Van Sant’s film was a shot-for-shot recreation of its 1960 predecessor save for two or three differences, it was a rarity in that, given its context, it ended up being the former. It, for all its failures in execution, used semiotics to circumvent the aforementioned semantics of its identity. Continue Reading →
The Unforgivable
SimilarScrooge (1951),
Watch afterDon't Look Up (2021), The Power of the Dog (2021),
Far more frustrating than a disastrous mess is a film annoyingly close to being good or vastly more interesting. That's The Unforgivable, a sloppy retelling of the Sally Wainwright's (Gentleman Jack, Happy Valley) 2009 BBC miniseries. Continue Reading →