214 Best Releases From the Genre Mystery (Page 10)

Admit it: we're all preemptively exhausted by Disney+'s seemingly endless onslaught of new films and franchise shows set to premiere over the next few years: we're going to be practically drowning in content, all geared toward immersing us in the brands and IPs they mercilessly control and asking audiences to buy into an ever-overwhelming web of interconnected stories. That said, ifWandaVision is a bellwether for the level of experimentation and creativity we can expect from some of these shows, we might not be in the worst hands. Continue Reading →

To watch the Apple TV+ series Servant is to frequently ask “What is this show about, exactly?” Is it about the dangers of gaslighting? The horror of postpartum psychosis? Something even more sinister than that? It seems to want to say something about all of these things, but in a sort of muddled, half-formed fashion. Season 2 is more of the same, while pushing the boundaries of how long the initial deception could last far beyond a realistic limit. Continue Reading →

On March 17, 1985, Maria Hernandez was shot by an intruder. Fortunately, the bullet ricocheted off of her keys as she used them to shield her face. Her roommate, Dayle Okazaki, was not as lucky, and the intruder shot her in the face as she cowered behind the kitchen counter. Afterward, the killer pulled Tsai-Lian "Veronica" Yu out of her car and shot her as well. Continue Reading →

Based on the novel of the same name by Emma Healey, the new-to-American-TV-movie Elizabeth is Missing seems at the surface like yet another in the seemingly endless parade of missing women in television and film. We’ve seen lost women from trains and in windows, what more can there be? Written by Andrea Gibb and directed by Aisling Walsh, Elizabeth is Missing is less a story about an actual missing person and more a story about loss, aging, and the slippery movement of memory.  Continue Reading →

With its magic, monsters, and ridiculously attractive cast, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina makes no attempt at relatability. However, while its fourth and final season is filled with situations that no person will ever find themselves in, its premise of a world being assaulted with unimaginable terrors before finally succumbing to a soulless void is a #2020mood.  Continue Reading →

David Fincher's meticulous anti-murder-mystery is a curious marriage of thriller and romantic comedy. When glancing at David Fincher’s filmography, romance may not come to mind. There are the gruesome murders in Se7en, the unsolved mysteries in Zodiac, and the rise of social media titans in The Social Network. In 2014’s Gone Girl, adapted for the screen by Gillian Flynn from her own novel, Fincher dives deep into the marriage of Amy (Rosamund Pike) and Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a picturesque couple suddenly thrust into the national spotlight when Amy goes missing. As the film unravels, it becomes clear that Amy orchestrated her disappearance to teach the philandering Nick a lesson. Amy and Nick may have deceived each other, but the real master of deception Fincher. Gone Girl is packaged as a psychological thriller, but it’s also Fincher’s most romantic film, the director flirting with us by using both the conventions of the thriller and rom-com genres. As a result, it woos the audience with a twisted love story. Continue Reading →

David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is both a quite good movie and a deeply frustrating one. At its best, it thrillingly delves into the art of investigation through the eyes of two well-crafted and well-performed protagonists. At its worst, it falls flat on its face and takes its sweet time to get up, dust itself off, and get back into a groove. Continue Reading →

The Expanse has always excelled at handling the sheer bigness of its stakes: events don't just impact individual characters, but the entire system -- and, I suspect, eventually the entire universe, given the underlying threat of the weapons that killed the Ring Builders. But as comparatively terrestrial as season five's stakes have been so far, episode four of season 5, "Gaugamela," leapfrogs off the last episode's shocking final moments to shake up the status quo in literally seismic ways. As bad as things got in the final moments of episode 3, here we see an episode of chickens coming home to roost, setting up a whole host of problems for our characters to resolve in the latter half of the season. Continue Reading →

First and foremost, Zodiac is a movie about seeing. Seeing patterns, seeing possibilities, seeing threads to pick up and follow, even if they don’t end up going anywhere. Like Se7en, a great deal of focus is on the tediousness of a murder investigation: the collecting and comparing of fingerprints, tired looking men discussing clues in dank, poorly-lit offices, sparring with the media, and endless, often pointless phone calls. The violence in Zodiac is shocking, but brief, reserved to the first half hour of the movie. Even the use of crime scene photos is kept to a minimum. Unlike Se7en, David Fincher isn’t rubbing the horrors we inflict on each other in the audience’s face. Here, it’s something more subtle, the creeping fear of I know I’m right...but what do I do now? Continue Reading →

When I saw that Netflix made all ten hour-long episodes of its new ballet show, Tiny Pretty Things, available to review, I was intimidated. Even during a global pandemic, ten hours of uninterrupted solo TV time can be hard to come by on short notice. Luckily, Tiny Pretty Things was built to be binged. Fast-paced and drama-filled, the story whisks viewers away from their own lives and plunges them into a grim, seedy world of backroom dealings, sexual blackmail, Machiavellian schemes, and, finally, ballet.  Continue Reading →

Director David Fincher’s movies are generally fascinated with creating a mythos around his characters that then breeds an egotistical obsession of oneself. It’s no wonder famous people like Mark Zuckerberg, Orson Welles, and the Zodiac Killer became points of fascination for him. He is also fascinated by propaganda and engages in it a bit himself.  Continue Reading →

There are two moments in The Wilds that so succinctly summarize the show’s tone, we have just have to start with them. In the first episode, Leah Rilke (Sarah Pidgeon) barrels directly down the lens of the camera and declares the life of a teenage girl in America in the 21st Century to be literal hell as if in direct conversation with the audience. Then, later in the series, Rachel Reid (Reign Edwards) searches for the word melodrama, applying it to the actions of her fellow island isolated survivors. And that’s The Wilds for you. Tremendously unsubtle and one-hundred percent aware of it. It also happens to be very good. Continue Reading →

Back in mid-March, Simon Boyes called Adam Mason about an idea for a pandemic thriller. The two writing partners quickly sketched out a plot outline, it began to pick up traction, and it was only a matter of days before Michael Bay came on to the project as a producer. The name would be Songbird. It’d also begin filming that July with Mason directing and come out in December, less than nine months after its inception. All of this said, it’s hard to dissect what’s worse: the fact that people exploited a global tragedy so quickly, or the final result. Continue Reading →

Brian De Palma's bizarro, big-budget blastoff is rocky, but it remains an effectively fun entry in the director's filmography. Although primarily known for dark suspense thrillers, Brian De Palma’s filmography is studded with a number of seemingly offbeat projects that one might not normally associate with the director of Carrie and Dressed to Kill. Even among his most ardent fans, though, a project like his 2000 effort, Mission to Mars, continues to serve as a bit of a bafflement. If you had to select the least suitable project imaginable for one of Hollywood’s most iconoclastic and cynical filmmakers, you could hardly do better than propose he make an expensive, optimistic PG sci-fi epic for Disney that was loosely inspired by one of their theme park attractions.  The results were perhaps not very surprising. Aside from France, where it screened as part of that year’s Cannes Film Festival and was ranked #4 on Cahiers du cinema’s list of the best films of the year, it was a financial and critical failure. It’s rarely discussed today even amongst De Palma scholars. (De Palma himself only briefly touches on it in the documentary De Palma.) And yet, to watch it again 20 years after its initial release is an interesting experience. It clearly pales in comparison to such works as Blow Out, Phantom of the Paradise, and Femme Fatale and it’s still wildly uneven in many ways. At the same time, to watch De Palma attempt to embrace new things in both genre and mindset is fascinating. It even contains one of the most absolutely spellbinding set pieces in a career that is not exactly wanting in that regard and as such, the end result makes sense in the grand scheme of his career. Continue Reading →

Amazon's adaptation of the Agatha Christie mystery keeps the author's innate spirit for intrigue. The dreary insistence of death permeates every fiber of The Pale Horse, a new mystery miniseries from BBC arriving on Amazon Prime Video this Friday the 13th, if you dare. Composed of just two hour-long episodes, The Pale Horse is a loose adaptation of the 1961 detective novel by Agatha Christie, one of her final works. To adapt the story’s complex web of intriguingly dark characters, Sarah Phelps (EastEnders) innovates the material through clever addition and subtraction, while maintaining the harrowing spirit of Christie’s pen. Set in 1960s London, The Pale Horse follows the stoic Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell), a rich antique dealer whose wife Delphine (Georgina Campbell) tragically died a year prior. Though she haunts Mark at seemingly every moment he’s not awake, the aging socialite has already taken in a new young wife, Hermia (Kaya Scodelario), who appears to have a more violent temperament hidden beneath her cold, pristine exterior.  It’s not long before a string of coincidental deaths and unexplainable occurrences begin to take shape all around Easterbrook. The woman he’s been cheating with dies mysteriously and suddenly in her sleep and the seemingly unrelated death of a shopkeeper turns up a list in her possession with his name on it. Bewildered by the stink of death all over him and now his world of friends and acquaintances, Easterbrook sets out on a personal investigation to discover what’s really happening, all while being hounded by the unrelenting Inspector Lejeune (Sean Pertwee). Continue Reading →

Apple TV+'s reboot of the Spielberg-created anthology series gets off to a lackluster start. There’s something really special about an anthology series: it allows show creators to let their imaginations run wild and try different concepts that may not work for a movie or longer series. Apple TV+’s latest series, Amazing Stories, has the fledgling streaming service trying its hand at the format, but the episode available for preview doesn’t live up to the show’s title.  It’s actually kind of odd that Apple is rebooting Amazing Stories. The 1985 original run wasn’t a hit and while reruns played on The Sci-Fi Channel before it became Syfy, it doesn’t seem to have a large cult appeal. Still, the series does boast a producing credit by Steven Spielberg and its showrunners are Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz of Lost fame, so at least Apple has some star power to bolster the lagging nostalgic appeal.  Name recognition can only get you so far, however, and the success of the show will have to rely on its 5 episode run. Apple has only supplied one episode for critics, titled “The Cellar”, which was directed by Chris Long (The Americans). The story follows carpenter Sam Taylor (Dylan O’Brien, Bumblebee), who is restoring an old house with his brother Jack (Michah Stock, The Right Stuff).  Continue Reading →

Jason Segel gives us an energetic journey with compelling characters to balance a campy premise. About halfway through the first episode of AMC’s Dispatches From Elsewhere, Simone (Eve Lindley), one of the main characters, exclaims: “I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s freaking fun!” This phrase just about sums up this new show, created by and starring Jason Segel. While Dispatches is scripted entertainment, it's based on the documentary The Institute, which explores the hybrid alternate reality game and performance art piece by Oakland based artist Jeff Hull. From 2008 to 2011, Hull “inducted” thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Jejune Institute. He created multiple “episodes” for inductees to participate in, giving them missions with instructions as silly as dancing at a phone box to things as grand as leading a parade. Segel moves the action from San Francisco to Philadelphia but retains the ridiculous and almost cult-like nature of its source material in depicting the on-screen Jejune Institute and its rival the Elsewhere Society. In the first episode, we are introduced to Peter, an average joe working a dull job. Intrigued by flyers with nonsensical adverts for dolphin communication and human forcefield testing, he calls a number and is invited to an office building downtown. He’s soon roped into a world of intrigue just below the surface of our everyday world, where two entities, the corporate Jejune Institute and more radical Elsewhere Society, frantically search for Clara (Cecilia Balagot), a mysterious inventor whose talent promises to liberate humanity from societal shackles. Continue Reading →

Built in 1970 and finished in 1973, Chicago's Sears Tower was the epitome of neoliberalism. Whereas the other, more traditionally liberal buildings were humble and for the people, this one was better. It was bigger, taller, providing more room while taking up less space. It even beat out the Empire State Building with its 1,450 feet. Suffice it to say its edifice knew no bounds. But while it already dwarfed its sky like a capitalist Godzilla, it added antennas to grow another 279. The result was an onyx symbol that, with all its simplicity, said, “Come to me. Be my victim.” Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Objectively, remaking The Manchurian Candidate seems a wild proposition. The 1962 version was met with strong critical praise and audience support upon its release. Furthermore, Angela Lansbury’s depiction of Eleanor Iselin has only grown to near-mythic standards of appreciation since. On top of it all, the movie was also a deeply faithful adaptation of the novel. How and why does someone re-adapt/remake something that was both universally praised and hewed so close to the source material as to make being less faithful the only option? The most compelling answer lies in Jonathan Demme’s particular fixation on humanism. As has been well-established, the director has long been considered one of the most humane directors of the late 20th and early 21st Century. Through films like Something Wild, Rachel Getting Married, Beloved, and even Ricki and the Flash, the director has time and time again created empathetic portraits of people struggling through life. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie is a miscalculation on every level. As a meat-and-potatoes thriller, it fails utterly. As an exercise in style, it’s disjointed and unimpressive. A remake of Stanley Donen’s 1963 Hitchcockian comic mystery, Charade, could’ve brought out Demme’s humor, something largely absent from his films post-1990. Instead, the movie is a joyless, dull affair, resulting in something completely unnecessary. The film follows the broad plot of the original movie: a woman on holiday in Europe meets a mysterious man. When she finds out her husband has been murdered, she gets caught up in a game of international intrigue, fortune-seeking, and mistaken identity. While the original starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, The Truth About Charlie stars Thandie Newton and Mark Wahlberg. Already the film has an issue—namely, that Newton and Wahlberg are no Hepburn and Grant. A simple comparison to the original movie is warranted only because The Truth About Charlie is so hollow and unmotivated that the comparison has to be made. Otherwise, it's incomprehensible as a work of art. Continue Reading →