250 Best Releases From the Genre Thriller (Page 5)

What a stupid title for a movie. It’s only one letter short from the straight-to-DVD Cars spinoff, Planes. At least that made sense, though, since small children who are really into airplanes were its key demo.  Continue Reading →

What makes a novel “unfilmable”? Often, it’s because it’s simply too large in scope and scale, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which depicts the lives of seven generations of the same family. Or, as with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, it’s too dense and labyrinthian. The more successful attempts, such as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman, have been filmed in multiple parts, while failures like 2017’s The Dark Tower condense the story down to its most basic components, checking off the most salient points (“there was a tower, it was dark”) and nothing more. Continue Reading →

Scott Cooper’s sense of place and his sense of dread go hand in hand. He was born in Abingdon, Virginia, a city with a population under 10,000, and the place’s melancholy struck him like lightning. Every one of his films is concerned with the impossibility of calling somewhere home, and he shows that even places meant to hold promise are forbidding and corrupt. From the dying factory town of Out of the Furnace to the blood-soaked frontier in Hostiles to the addiction-ravaged backwoods of Antlers, nothing can make Cooper’s America feel anything but haunted. And that's the case in his latest, The Pale Blue Eye. Continue Reading →

Catastrophe strikes about half an hour into The Poseidon Adventure, in a sequence that remains ingenious and exhilarating to this day. Slammed on New Year’s Eve by a tsunami caused by an underwater earthquake, the ocean liner SS Poseidon capsizes in swift, spectacular fashion. The bridge is first to go, instantly obliterated by the brunt of the wave, before death and destruction spread to the ballroom where the passengers have gathered to celebrate. Furniture slides and then tumbles, pianos plummet in an avalanche of ivory, pulverized glass commingles with confetti in an ominous flurry, partygoers are hurled like ragdolls and brutally crushed, with the last to fall clinging hopelessly to the floor (now the ceiling) before gravity inexorably claims them. Continue Reading →

When people sit down to analyze the career of maverick filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, his 1972 thriller The Getaway is usually found wanting, and remembered mainly for the scandalous affair that developed between co-stars Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. Coming smack in the middle of a filmmaking stretch that was preceded by the highly controversial The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971), and followed by the wildly idiosyncratic Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), it feels like an exercise in playing it safe from a director not exactly famous for doing such things. Despite that, it still works as a solid crime thriller that demonstrated that Peckinpah could play by Hollywood’s rules if he wanted to do so. Continue Reading →

No recent film has understood the Internet quite like Searching. Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 thriller follows John Cho as David, a father desperately searching for his missing daughter. The film is formatted entirely on screens, a new form of visual storytelling called Screenlife. We see David’s investigation through video calls, websites, and digital files. But at the heart of the story is a deep understanding of the way people, especially young people, can take on new lives through technology. Continue Reading →

It’s Christmas time, and a man at the breaking point finds himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. But he isn’t retired cop John McClane this time. Instead, it’s Saint Nick with a sledgehammer he’d like to swing into your bowl full of jelly. The premise of Violent Night is simple (Die Hard but with Santa), and the filmmakers mostly pull off the kill-fest thanks to some game performers and one inspired sequence.   Continue Reading →

Park Chan-wook fans can rest assured that the director who gave us the twisty, blood-soaked passions of Oldboy, Stoker, and The Handmaiden has returned with another romantic crime-fueled drama. His latest, Decision to Leave, is high-grade neo-noir, the newest installment in Park’s ongoing exploration of the genre.   Continue Reading →

The modern age of sequels, spin-offs, and all other franchise extensions has amplified complaints about how derivative follow-ups can be. As a result, sequels have garnered a bad reputation, and it’s not unearned.  Continue Reading →

Where do we even begin? Continue Reading →

Stephen King is best known for his massive novels that require weight training just to hold. Entire forest ecosystems have been destroyed so we can have The Stand on our bookshelves. These epic tales are his bread and butter, but if you want to get a pure distillation of what makes King a gifted horror writer and storyteller, check out his short story collections. They provide the strong, grounded characters facing terrifying circumstances that he’s famous for in his longer novels, but in a digestible format. He can be hit or miss (even the best writers may have stinkers when they write an astonishing ten pages a day like King) but if one short story is garbage, chances are the next one will be a fun time.   Continue Reading →

James Nguyen hammers down the end of his bad-movie trilogy with a true stinker of birdemic proportions... and not in a fun way. (This review is part of our coverage of Fantastic Fest 2022.) With its stilted acting, incompetent screenplay and direction, and special effects that looked like someone puttering around with After Effects for the very first time, James Nguyen’s "ecological horror" film Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) became a cult favorite among bad film fanatics, especially latecomers to the hoopla surrounding The Room looking for something they could claim as their own. Continue Reading →

Since Lou greets you with the logo of J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot, a question surfaces: Is this a Cloverfield project? Or, like 10 Cloverfield Lane, it isn’t one until it is? Continue Reading →

With the exception of Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill is the contemporary filmmaker most closely associated with what was once the most American of film genres, the Western. They've been in relatively short supply for the last 50-odd years, but with projects like The Long Riders, Geronimo, Wild Bill, Broken Trail, and the pilot episode of Deadwood (not to mention modern-set takes on the form like Extreme Prejudice and Last Man Standing), Hill’s been doing what he can to keep the form and its traditions alive. His latest, Dead for a Dollar (his first film in six years), is unlikely to spur a revival anytime soon and its bypassing of theaters for a VOD release all but ensures that it will be overlooked by all but his most dedicated fans. The good news is that those fans—and any others who should come across it—will be rewarded with a sturdy, entertaining work that overcomes its occasionally apparent budget constraints to serve as a welcome reminder that Hill remains one of the most fascinating genre filmmakers of our time.  Continue Reading →

Don’t Worry Darling, director Olivia Wilde’s latest film, is neither a masterpiece nor a disaster. Based on the amount of behind the scenes drama that has surrounded the entire production filming to promotion, this review will surely come as a disappointment to some. But if not for the gossip about the filming of the movie and the celebrities involved, this deeply forgettable film would probably fade from the public eye in no time at all. Continue Reading →

Makbul Mubarak’s debut Autobiography delves deep to examine loyalty & family under dictatorship. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival) Makbul Mubarak’s first feature Autobiography is only truly autobiographical in terms of the larger questions his upbringing in Indonesia under the Suharto regime raises about loyalty vs. fealty and whether “loyalty [is] still honorable if and when it is pledged to something monstrous”. Continue Reading →

Mercedes Bryce Morgan directs Fixation, an uneven but fascinating psychological drama about a woman who undergoes an unorthodox version of therapy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival) Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s Fixation is the kind of film that seems to have been created specifically to play in the late-night slots at film festivals. It's a dark and hallucinatory mix of Pink Floyd: The Wall, Synecdoche, New York and a offering from the Lifetime network, and while I can't exactly say I completely liked it (or could even pass a quiz regarding its particulars), it's presented with enough energy and daring that it's easy to overlook that it doesn’t quite come together in the end. Continue Reading →

It's safe to say that no one necessarily asked for a sequel to Ti West's X, especially six mere months after its release. Not because it was bad, mind you; it was actually quite good, a nifty throwback to Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a hefty soupcon of Debbie Does Dallas tossed in the mix. But its tale of a ragtag amateur-porn crew besieged by a murderous old country crone envious of their youthful beauty and raging libidos hardly cried out for a followup. Yet here we are with Pearl, a prequel that dabbles in decidedly different genre homages but might just be the superior slasher of the two. Continue Reading →

Ask someone if they’ve seen 2014’s Goodnight Mommy, and if their immediate response is to shudder, you’ll know they have. The Austrian cult horror film combines so many tropes – psychological horror, body horror, paranoia, twins, creepy kids, creepy moms, etc. – that it seems like it should be an incoherent mess, but is instead a tightly paced, relentless assault on the nerves. Even the trailer is creepier than many mainstream horror films, while only showing a tiny bit of how bad things get in it. Continue Reading →

God’s Country shows a place in America rarely described. There’s a vastness, an emptiness to Sandra Guidry’s (Thandiwe Newton) home. She’s moved from New Orleans out to the country. It’s the sort of place where a single man in law enforcement covers hundreds of miles of terrain. A Black professor in an all-white department at a local university, Guidry lives in her house alone on acres of land, prime hunting ground for those hoping to shoot and score. Julian Higgins’s thriller plays out like a matchstick, a burn that erodes everything until there’s nothing left to destroy.   Continue Reading →

“You’ve seen one you seen them all," says the dastardly movie director from beyond the grave. It’s the recently murdered Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), telling us early in the film about how stale the murder mystery genre was even by the 1950s, when See How They Run takes place. It’s also a warning to the audience that this movie will not be adding anything new, revelatory, or exciting to whodunnit cinema. Everything here has been done before, and better.  Continue Reading →