255 Best Releases From the Genre Thriller (Page 9)

While we spent a lot of time debating whether or not “elevated horror” is a real thing or just something film snobs made up so they didn’t have to be embarrassed about liking a scary movie, gore fell to the wayside. There was a period when we weren’t getting an acceptable amount of blood and guts, in favor of understated chills and psychological trauma. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it’s left something lacking in the genre. With Nia DaCosta’s take on Candyman and the upcoming Halloween Kills, however, it looks like old-fashioned look-between-the-fingers horror is back in all its splattery glory. Add to that list James Wan’s Malignant, often very silly, but always with a self-aware wink at the audience, with a body count that will satisfy even the most jaded horror fans. Continue Reading →

As sparse as it is specific, Nia DaCosta’s Candyman feels like falling into a nightmare. It has the context, but the context feels increasingly shifted. It has the gravity, but the weight at hand seems to fall onto its audience in slow motion. It has a sense of remove but also a sense of intimacy, and as the picture develops, those schisms manage to lean into one another. Bernard Rose’s 1992 original was about the outsider looking in. DaCosta’s, on the other hand, is about the insider being forcibly removed from himself, and it’s a film as attuned to its own legacy as it is the legacy that’s been hoisted upon it. Continue Reading →

As Fantasia draws to a close, we're catching up on some of the smaller films from the fest before they slip from our fingers into the Montreal air. First up is Indemnity, a surprisingly lean and confident (albeit familiar) action thriller from South Africa's Gambit Films, proof positive that the most interesting action pictures are coming from places outside Hollywood. At its core, it's a meat-and-potatoes conspiracy caper At the center of Indemnity is a traumatized firefighter named Theo Abrams (Jarrid Geduld), still reeling from the mental anguish and PTSD that came from a particularly bad blaze that killed several people around him. Meanwhile, his wife Angie (Nicole Fortuin), an investigative journalist, gets wrapped up in a conspiracy involving defense contractors and shadowy government figures -- and despite failed warnings, she ends up dead in their bed one morning, with Theo suddenly becoming the prime suspect. From there, Theo goes on the run, becoming a tense mix of John Wick and Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, smashing and crashing his way through setpieces and plot beats that would feel familiar to anyone raised on 1990s Hollywood action films. But despite this familiarity, there's a certain charm to Indemnity that makes its pastiche sing a bit more than you'd expect. Maybe it's the committed performance from Geduld (who handles his choreography with a bruiser's brutality), or the comparatively homespun nature of the production. Indemnity does a lot with a little; it clearly doesn't have Hollywood's resources, but it uses those limitations in uniquely charming ways. Dustups in prison vans and elevators have a wincing vitality that only seems to come when a film feels like it's putting its actors in real danger. Continue Reading →

Director Brian Andrew Mendoza and Jason Momoa go back way before their newest collaboration, the Netflix feature Sweet Girl. Not only did Mendoza serve as the cinematographer for Momoa’s 2018 action vehicle Braven, but Mendoza has also produced several other Momoa projects and even made a small appearance in the actor’s 2011 Conan the Barbarian movie! Unfortunately, their rich history together doesn't inspire a greater level of depth (or basic entertainment value) in the latest entry in the Netflix DTV action world, Sweet Girl. Continue Reading →

Hollywood is in something of a conundrum these days. Audiences have by no means lost their taste for a good action flick, but such movies are meant for a theater experience, which has become somewhat limited by necessity. Then there’s the fact that so much of our lust for violence tends to be sated by established properties such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its competitors, not to mention other franchises such as the Fast & the Furious and The Purge movies. Continue Reading →

It’s strange what grief does to us. Some end up reduced to quivering messes. Others feel inspired to seize their remaining days with vigor. For Beth (Rebecca Hall) in Night House, grieving the suicide of her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) pushes her to sharp retorts and the kind of sarcasm that both obfuscates and reveals pain by day. By night, drinking, attempts to pack up her life, and the ever-growing sense that while Owen’s deceased, he hasn’t exactly left their home, the one he designed and built. Continue Reading →

Another week, another showcase of the latest and greatest from Montreal's Fantasia International Film Fest -- including some real barn-burners this time around from Canada and Japan, respectively. First up is a heaping helping of Southern Gothic menace with Vincent Grashaw's What Josiah Saw, a film that throws its viewers into a kettle of water and slowly turns up the temperature one degree at a time until you don't even realize you're boiling. Set among four diffuse chapters whose connections only truly unravel in the final act, What Josiah Saw tracks the estranged, diasporic Graham family, three children haunted by the suicide of their matriarch decades prior. It was an act presumably precipitated by the various and sundry sins of their despotic, controlling father Josiah (a menacing, magnetic Robert Patrick), a man who's long touted his disbelief in God and who often took his earthly rages out on his family. The kids' childhood traumas bleed through into adulthood: Eli (Nick Stahl) is an unscrupulous criminal fresh out of jail, in debt to an unscrupulous bar owner played by Jake Weber; Mary (Kelli Garner) has ostensibly escaped to normalcy, but her anxieties about potential motherhood create rifts between her and her husband (Tony Hale). Then there's Thomas (Scott Haze), the comparatively simple-minded brother who stayed, the only one still in thrall to Josiah's whims. He seems happy to be there, quietly accepting of his fate as Josiah's lapdog. This becomes especially clear when Josiah announces one morning that his mother came to him in a vision the night before: She's burning in Hell for killing herself, and Josiah knows the only way to save her. The two fix up the house and prepare for guests -- just as Eli and Kelli get word that an oil company is ready to sell their childhood home, the source of all their grief and pain, for loads of money. Continue Reading →

In Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater, Matt Damon wears a baseball hat. He notches his sunglasses, a pair of knockoff Oakleys, on the brim of his cap; the rest of his body is covered by an assortment of denim, flannel, plaid and Carhartt products. These costume choices are the movie’s way of telling us that Damon’s character, Bill Baker, is a “regular guy.” Unfortunately, outside of his wardrobe, there’s nothing that really defines Bill, and even less that makes Stillwater worth watching.  Continue Reading →

No cute jokes, no games. Let’s just get the pun out of the way from the top: Old is not a film that ages well. It’s an idea movie. It’s one that pegs itself on a concept, and yet, for the first 40 minutes or so, is bolstered by its more baffling choices. The dialogue feels like it was run back and forth through Google Translate a half-dozen times. The delivery is startlingly stilted, so much so that the sheer artifice combined with the ostentatious camerawork often borders on Camp. As hard as it is to pin down, it’s actually quite stimulating. What it gives us is too specific to dismiss as naive, so why doesn’t it actually working in the end? Continue Reading →

The sense of rot in Pig is almost constant. There’s progression but no real growth for much of its short runtime, no feeling of true human connection through its first half. For a while, its empathy only comes from within. It comes within its hero; its intimacy only blossoms when there’s no one else to dry it from the roots up. The man in question is Robin (Nicolas Cage). He was a well-known chef but has since jumped ship, living in a shack in the Oregon wilderness and hunting truffles with his foraging pig. His only consistent human interaction is with a yuppie-type named Amir (Alex Wolff), but that’s strictly transactional. Continue Reading →

Nadja (Peri Baumeister, The Last Kingdom), a cautious, brittle woman battling a terrifying illness, boards an overnight flight from Germany to the United States. With her is Elias (Carl Anton Koch), her sweet, precocious son. They're hoping to make a new start in America, where a talented team of doctors wait to help Nadja find a cure for her sickness. While at the gate, Elias befriends Farid (Kais Setti, Dogs of Berlin)—a kind young man bound for a conference. Continue Reading →

Son suffers from its own ubiquitousness. It’s part of a timely revival in cult horror. It’s at least the third horror film in the past several months in which someone is forced to kill for a loved one. Right out of the gate, writer/director Ivan Kavanagh is challenged with having to set his film apart from the rest of the pack and mostly succeeds, thanks largely to excellent performances from his cast. Continue Reading →

Some movies have a tone to them, a sort of flavor that pervades the proceedings. The God Committee’s flavor is, decidedly, sour. And not just lightly so. Continue Reading →

The Purge franchise, spanning five films and a now-canceled two-season television series, was never one to traffic in nuance or subtlety, or even optimism. Its premise is born of a kind of didactic, Shirley Jackson-esque thought experiment: what if all crimes, even murder, were legal for 12 hours? How would people react, and who would they become, when they could let out their raging ids just for a night? From its second film, the Carpenter-esque The Purge: Anarchy, series creator James DeMonaco tacked on a third question: What if *gasp* the rich and powerful were just using the Purge as a means to cull the poor, the marginalized, and nonwhite? Continue Reading →

After spending more than two decades living in the shadow of Norman Bates, the character that he played to such indelible effect in Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking classic Psycho (1960), Anthony Perkins finally came to terms with the character that ensured his place in cinema history by electing to appear in Psycho II (1983), which picked up the story of his character with his release after spending 22 years in an asylum and his ill-fated decision to return to his childhood home and its adjacent motel. Continue Reading →

Pregnancy sucks. Though we do it all the time, because otherwise god forbid more women would choose to not subject themselves to it, it seems almost morally wrong to sugarcoat it. Even an “easy” pregnancy is uncomfortable at best, when foods you normally love become repulsive, and even tasks as simple as putting on shoes become a comedy of errors, if your feet can even still fit in them. Childbirth itself is the most excruciating pain the human body can endure, and the effort for such a “natural and beautiful” process can result in vaginal tears that can make future intercourse difficult. Mostly, we just get real weird about pregnant people. Pregnancy is perceived as a communal event, with everyone, even casual friends and co-workers pushing advice and suggestions, while often dismissing (if not shutting down outright), the pregnant person’s needs and concerns. Ilana Glazer and John Lee’s False Positive is a chillingly effective look at an expectant parent’s sharp decline from excitement to unease to paranoid terror. Her fears are brushed off as part of “mommy brain,” but there may be something to it. Continue Reading →

Isabelle Furhman's relentless lead performance as an obsessive aspiring athlete propels the Tribeca rowing drama forward. “Rhythm is everything,” a crew coach tells Alex (Isabelle Fuhrman) at one point during The Novice, which won awards for best U.S. narrative feature, actress, and cinematography at the Tribeca Festival this week. The coach could well be explaining how this movie, about a college student with an obsessive drive to be the best at varsity rowing, differentiates itself from Black Swan (the movie about a young woman with an obsessive drive to be the best at ballet) or Whiplash (the movie about a young man with an obsessive drive to be the best at jazz drumming) or The Social Network (the movie about a college student with an obsessive drive to be the best at something, even if it winds up destroying the world, in part because there’s no way that he can row crew)—all of which The Novice resembles in content, and sometimes form. Writer-director Lauren Hadaway’s rhythm is her own, distinct from Darren Aronofsky’s, David Fincher’s, and Damien Chazelle’s, the triumvirate of dude directors who made those previous, excellent studies in obsession. Perhaps informed by her own college rowing experience, Hadaway keys into a relentless push-pull, especially as Alex drives herself further, further, and further still before picking herself up off the floor. Continue Reading →

It can’t be overstated how much the mid-90s belonged to Jim Carrey. Largely a stand-up comedian and supporting actor at first, Carrey shot to stardom thanks to In Living Color, and the grotesque characters he played on it, including the disfigured Fire Marshall Bill, and ponytailed lady bodybuilder Vera de Milo. His leap to leading roles in comedy features was swift and wildly successful, with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber all released the same year. There hadn’t been a comic actor much like Carrey before, someone who did childish things like pretend to talk out of his butt, but also had a wild look in his eyes that suggested a hint of danger with the body contorting nonsense. Continue Reading →

No Man of God, Amber Sealey's Ted Bundy picture, is well made but does not successfully distinguish itself from its fellow study-of-a-serial-killer films. In the days leading up to the Tribeca premiere of No Man of God, there was a brief dustup in the media when its director, Amber Sealey, did interviews in which she appeared to be taking potshots at recent films that had also been centered on notorious serial killer Ted Bundy for utilizing approaches that she suggested glorified him by depicting him as this brilliant and wildly charismatic character. This didn’t sit well with fellow filmmaker Joe Berlinger, who made Bundy the subject of his Netflix documentary series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) and the dramatic film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019), in which Bundy was portrayed by no less a figure than one-time teen heartthrob Zac Efron. He responded in kind by suggesting that Sealey was deliberately misrepresenting his work in order to pump up interest in her own film.Both Sealey and Berlinger have their points, I suppose. But as it turns out, this controversy may ultimately prove to be the most interesting thing about No Man of God in the end. Continue Reading →

It takes almost an hour for Patrick Hughes’ The Hitman’s Wife's Bodyguard to take a break. At around the 52-minute mark, the film goes without dialogue, gunshots/explosions, or a car chase. But this short-lived, relatively still moment lasts less than a minute. Like a person terrified of an awkward silence who just keeps talking and talking to fill the void, Hughes does not let the movie ever take a second to breathe.  Continue Reading →

In the world of Awake, the plague that’s fallen over mankind is one we’re all at least vaguely familiar with: insomnia. A brilliant flash and satellites falling from the sky, and suddenly the entire world has lost its ability to sleep. Bleary, desperate citizens watch helplessly as their sanity slips away, forming classic post-apocalyptic factions. There are criminals that run rampant, violent zealots, and creepy militias. Continue Reading →