Archive for the ‘Thriller’ Category
Monday, August 25th, 2025
I’ve been watching Spike Lee movies since I was a teenager in the late ’80s. Okay, I still haven’t seen SHE HATE ME, but otherwise I see all of them, and any new one is obviously gonna be an event for me. They’re pretty infrequent these days, though – it’s been five years since his last movie (DA 5 BLOODS), seven since his last theatrical release (BLACKKKLANSMAN). So I’m thankful that even though it was made for Apple TV+ the new one is playing at my favorite theater, SIFF Downtown, f/k/a Cinerama.
HIGHEST 2 LOWEST is, yes, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW (1963), itself based on the Ed McBain 87th Precinct Mystery King’s Ransom (1959). So that means it tells the story of an executive dealing with a kidnapping/ransom situation while also trying to take over control of his company. Instead of the shoe industry this time it’s the music industry, and instead of the guy who runs the factories he’s a Grammy winning, cover of Rolling Stone, “best ear in the business” producer/label owner/icon. Denzel Washington (RICOCHET) plays David King, founder of Stackin’ Hits Records, obviously. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A$AP Rocky, Akira Kurosawa, Aubrey Joseph, Denzel Washington, Ed McBain, Elijah Wright, Howard Drossin, Ice Spice, Ilfenesh Hadera, Jeffrey Wright, Michael Potts, remakes, Spike Lee
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Drama, Thriller | 3 Comments »
Friday, August 8th, 2025
As some of you are aware I am an avowed triple-A (Ari Aster Appreciator). I loved his two hit horror movies (HEREDITARY and MIDSOMMAR) and then I loved his flop comedy (BEAU IS AFRAID) even more, so obviously I was gonna see his new one EDDINGTON no matter what. When it was announced it was described as a western, which is a stretch – nobody would put this in the westerns section at a video store. But yeah, it has feuds and jurisdictional disagreements between a small town sheriff, the mayor and the Native law enforcement just over the border, trouble in a bar, various groups trying to profit from a big construction project, things devolving into a big shootout. I get it.
Of Aster’s other movies it’s closest to BEAU, but it’s less surreal and, to me at least, not nearly as funny. In fact it might’ve made me laugh less than any of them. But there are certainly some good ones in there and I did laugh just thinking about some of its ideas while discussing it with friends.
What it definitely does achieve is a stressful portrait of what our lives have become in the last half decade. It’s set in May of 2020 and begins with a series of confrontations over mask ordinances. Eddington, New Mexico Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, U TURN) doesn’t want to wear a mask when officers from the Pueblo tribe insist he follow the law in their jurisdiction. Later he forces a grocery store to allow in a guy who refuses to mask (James Cady, “Train Conductor,” HOSTILES). Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, THE EQUALIZER 2) happens to be there and tries to calmly reason with Joe, who then goes outside and does a livestream announcing that he’s running against him in the next election. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amelie Hoeferle, Ari Aster, Austin Butler, Cameron Mann, Clifton Collins Jr., Darius Khondji, Deirdre O'Connell, Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix, Luke Grimes, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Pedro Pascal, William Belleau
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Thriller | 35 Comments »
Wednesday, May 28th, 2025
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING does not necessarily seem like “well guys, that’s the last one” at the end, but as a whole it definitely does play like they’re trying to wrap things up. Though the seven previous films in the series have been mostly disconnected, this one follows the series’ only cliffhanger, and has multiple instances of people discussing the past adventures of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, THE MUMMY), complete with clips. It has two big story threads that tie directly to Brian DePalma’s part I, plus a connection to J.J. Abrams’ part III. Both the NOC list and the Rabbit’s Foot come up – mcmuffin reminiscences from a movie series that has lasted more than four times as long as the TV series it was based on. And that ran for seven seasons!
I think it lives up to the series’ 29-year-long tradition of great entertainment, but it is also by far the sloppiest chapter. That’s not to say it’s lazy – quite the opposite. I think it just got too wild and out of control to ever sculpt it into an elegant shape. They might still be chiseling away at it as we speak.
I’m not one to complain about long runtimes and unnecessary scenes, especially when the format demands zipping around through a string of incidents, but the first 45 minutes or so of this thing alternately feel like they didn’t have time to finish the edit or like we’re watching consecutive episodes of the world’s most expensive Quibi series. It opens with Ethan watching a VHS tape that’s his “your mission should you choose to accept it” message, though this time from President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett, F/X), and it’s a very long “as you know” type explanation of what happened in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE, what has happened in the months since, and a reminder that he has the “cruciform key” everyone wants, that he can use to open a thing in the sunken Russian submarine the Sevastapol for access to the source code of the rogue artificial intelligence known as “The Entity” that he wants to destroy and everyone else wants to control. Though it’s obviously ridiculous for her to be telling him this stuff he already knows, and it’s awkward in its length, the forced exposition kicking off a mission is part of the fun of this series. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Angela Bassett, Christopher McQuarrie, Esai Morales, Greg Tarzan Davis, Hayley Atwell, Henry Czerny, Katy O'Brian, Lucy Tulugarjuk, Nick Offerman, Pom Klementieff, Rolf Saxon, Shea Whigham, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames
Posted in Reviews, Action, Thriller | 50 Comments »
Thursday, May 8th, 2025
I knew the name Denys Arcand as a famous Canadian director. I remember the title JESUS OF MONTREAL as a movie that was advertised when I was a teenager, and later THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. I have not seen or really paid attention to these, but I did perk up a little when some of his early films were released on blu-ray by Canadian International Pictures, a Vinegar-Syndrome-affiliated label “devoted to resurrecting vital, distinctive, and overlooked triumphs of Canadian and Québécois cinema.” And I remembered that when Miguel Hombre recommended them (and Arcand in general) in a discussion of Canadian cinema in the comments to my COSMOPOLIS / MAPS TO THE STARS double feature review. Thank you Miguel.
CIP says their releases range “from arthouse to Canuxploitation,” and what makes GINA interesting is how it’s kind of both. By the end it’s fair to say it’s a rape-revenge movie, but before that it’s a socially conscious drama about labor, class and sexism. The titular Gina (Celine Lomez, THE SILENT PARTNER) is a stripper hired to dance at a cabaret in a small town. But much of the movie follows a group of nameless documentarians staying at the same hotel-motel while in town to interview workers at a textile factory that’s about to have massive layoffs. So there’s alot of screen time spent on just characters (and real people I think?) talking about strikes and unions and how workers are exploited and mistreated. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Canadian, Canuxploitation, Celine Lomez, Denys Arcand, Frederique Collin, Jean-Pierre Saulnier, Jocelyn Berube, Paule Baillargeon, Quebec, rape-revenge, snowmobiles
Posted in Reviews, Drama, Thriller | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, May 6th, 2025
COMPANION, which played in theaters a couple months ago and is now on disc and streaming, features certain genre elements that are strategically withheld for a while. For almost a third of its 97 minutes we can tell there’s something we’re missing about the main character because of some of the weird things people say to her, so we’re very intrigued. I don’t include myself in “we” though because I knew the premise of the movie, controversially (but understandably, I think) included in the second trailer and other promotions. There is good reason to go in blind, but I can confirm that the movie is still fun without being surprised by that part. And I’m not gonna write a review on eggshells, so I’m gonna get into it a couple paragraphs from now.
The movie is about a group of friends who go stay together at a rich guy’s fancy-ass lake house. Iris (Sophie Thatcher, MAXXXINE) is our narrator, these are friends of her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid, LOGAN LUCKY), and she’s worried she’s going to embarrass herself in front of them. Sure enough Kat (Megan Suri, IT LIVES INSIDE), who answers the door, barely acknowledges her presence. Poor Iris just stands there forcing a smile while a conversation goes on next to her. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Drew Hancock, Harvey Guillen, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Marc Menchaca, Megan Suri, Rupert Friend, Sophie Thatcher, Zach Cregger
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Thriller | 19 Comments »
Thursday, April 17th, 2025
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE (2022) is about a group of young people who have determined, quite reasonably, that the only voice they really have in stopping an oil company from poisoning their communities and exacerbating climate change is if they figure out how to sabotage their infrastructure enough to disrupt their business and make it less profitable. So that’s what they’re ready to do. They all rendezvous at a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, West Texas, some meeting for the first time, but they all know the plan, and they get to it.
I was a little thrown off by the opening, because it didn’t seem like the raw, authentic approach I had pictured. The filmatism is trying to make these twentysomethings rigging the security cameras at their maid jobs look like HACKERS meets OCEAN’S ELEVEN. And I was not buying this disparate team we see coming together – two messy punk rock kids (Kristine Froseth [THE ASSISTANT] and Lukas Gage [the villain the younger bouncer from the ROAD HOUSE remake]), one rugged camo-hat-wearing redneck (Jake Weary, MESSAGE FROM THE KING), etc. – how would they have gotten together? But it’s immediately thrilling with its blunt sense of purpose, its 16mm grain (cinematographer: Tehillah De Castro) and its un-ostentatious score by Gavin Brivik (The Pitt), with synths looping over beats banged out on oil drums. And though there will be scenes here and there that don’t ring true (like a cartoonish documentary director [Sam Quinn, JANE GOT A GUN] who says all the worst things to interview subjects in his one scene) it turns out to mostly play closer to “this must be what it would really be like” than just fun Hollywood bullshit. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ariela Barer, Daniel Goldhaber, environment, Forrest Goodluck, Irene Bedard, Jake Weary, Jordan Sjol, Kristine Froseth, Lukas Gage, Marcus Scribner, Sam Quinn, Sasha Lane
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 12 Comments »
Thursday, April 3rd, 2025
You know Reality Winner? The young translator who was working as an NSA contractor and got busted for leaking an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election? She got sick of hearing Glenn Greenwald in particular say it was a hoax when she had proof sitting right there, so she mailed it to The Intercept, who published unredacted scans of the documents, “accidentally” leading the feds to the exact printer they came out of. She pled guilty and was sentenced to 5 years and 3 months in prison under the Espionage Act of 1917, the longest sentence ever imposed for leaking classified information to the media.
I always thought it was an intriguing story because it seemed like such a foolish thing for somebody to do, but also sorta relatable, and of course you did a double take when you read her name. What was up with her? I got why they had to prosecute her, but it really seemed like she got a raw deal, even moreso in retrospect. The very guy who benefited from the Russian interference (and who ignored her pleas for clemency) later stole a literal truck load of secret documents, dumped them around his shit-ass country club like half-eaten pizzas in an ‘80s movie cop’s apartment, then committed numerous other serious crimes in the cover up of that crime. Winner served about four years, Trump was able to slow walk his with his own judge, have it dismissed and then fire the FBI agents assigned to (unsuccessfully) investigate him – this seems like an imbalance to me. They should at least fly Reality Winner to DC and give her one running kick to his nuts wearing a cement boot. Or she could outsource it to a Make a Wish Foundation kid if she chooses. I think something like that would be good for the country.
Anyway I was intrigued when I came across the 2024 movie WINNER on Hulu and realized it was a biopic of Reality Winner. (Tagline: “based on reality.”) The thumbnail looks more like a quirky indie comedy, and that’s kind of what it is. Instead of doing it as a big dramatic whistleblower thriller it’s Reality Winner (Emilia Jones, star of CODA) telling you the story like you’re a friend who gets her sense of humor. It has all kinds of drama and it got me emotional about family stuff but also it knows this is a colorful character and a wild story and it’s more effective to have fun with it than be self-important. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: based on a magazine article, Connie Britton, Emilia Jones, Kathryn Newton, Sydney Sweeney, whistleblowers, Zach Galifianakis
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Thriller | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, March 19th, 2025
BLACK BAG is the latest-latest from prolific retiree Steven Soderbergh. I’m mad at myself that I didn’t see his ghost movie PRESENCE in theaters last month, so I wasn’t gonna miss this. It’s one of his clever, expertly-executed genre exercises, this time reinventing the spy movie. The novelty is that it works completely as an exciting espionage thriller, with betrayals, murder, interrogations, trickery, etc., but done on a small scale, in a mere 2 (two) countries, centering around two dinner party scenes. And that flows naturally out of the fact that the main characters are a happily married couple. (And that it’s not about either of them being kidnapped.)
There is an issue, though. When George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender, JONAH HEX) is handed a list of five agents who may have stolen a top secret software called Severus, the list is made up of two couples he knows and his wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchettt, HANNA). He has one week to identify the traitor, and he begins his investigation by inviting the suspects all over for dinner and getting them talking. (The channa masala is drugged.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cate Blanchett, David Holmes, David Koepp, Gustaf Skarsgard, Marisa Abela, Michael Fassbender, Naomie Harris, Pierce Brosnan, Rege-Jean Page, spies, Steven Soderbergh, Tom Burke
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 44 Comments »
Thursday, February 20th, 2025
THE MENU (2022) is part of the 2020s wave of “rich assholes go to an island and something fucked up happens there” movies (see also: GLASS ONION, BLINK TWICE, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS [though they end up on the island by accident there]). Juror #2 Nicholas “Nux” Hoult plays Tyler Ledford, a food-nerd who proudly paid $1250 a plate to bring his less-interested date Margot, played by Furiosa #2 Anya Taylor-Joy, to a private island where celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes, THE AVENGERS) presents extravagant themed meals for exclusive clientele. Right away you know Tyler sucks because he calls Margot “babe” and lectures her about her palate, and that Margot is the final girl because she’s the only one looking back to see the boat leaving and the doors closing behind them. We side with her anyway because when Tyler raves about the lemon caviar and raw oyster with mignonette and mansplains that alginate is made of algae she says, “Yeah. Pond scum.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anya Taylor-Joy, best picture nominees, Carlos Diehz, Edward Berger, Hong Chau, Isabella Rosellini, Jacek Koman, Janet McTeer, John Leguizamo, John Lithgow, Judith Light, Lucian Msamati, Mark Mylod, Nicholas Hoult, Peter Deming, Ralph Fiennes, Reed Bierney, Seth Reiss, Stanley Tucci, the pope, Will Tracy
Posted in Reviews, Drama, Horror, Thriller | 37 Comments »
Thursday, January 30th, 2025
If you’re in a movie and you live in a small town then you bet your ass you’re a waitress at an old timey diner. In the case of LAST STRAW (2023), the dinerest movie I’ve seen since LAST STOP IN YUMA COUNTY, it’s called the Fat Bottom Bistro, and it’s one of those cool looking ones with metal walls inside and out, like an Airstream trailer. According to IMDb it was filmed at two diners in New York, and I believe the exterior is one in Germantown that has been closed for a while and likely maintained specifically to rent to productions like this. I bet the old fashioned jukebox with disco lights really works. You always gotta get a shot of those records inside.
This one (which I found on Shudder) centers on Nancy (Jessica Belkin, American Horror Story), a young woman trying to decide what to do with herself after graduating high school, other than drinking hard at parties and working at the diner owned by her dad (Jeremy Sisto, CLUELESS). She just found out she’s pregnant, father to be determined, or not, because it’s nobody in her life. As if that wasn’t bad enough, her car breaks down on the way to work, so she has to walk until her co-worker Bobby (Joji Otani-Hansen), a nice guy who clearly has a crush on her, can pick her up on his bicycle. When she finally arrives her dad tells her someone’s sick and she has to work the late shift alone with Jake (Taylor Kowalski, MAXXXINE), who she hates. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Scott Neal, Christopher M. Lopes, diner, Glen Gould, Jeremy Sisto, Jessica Belkin, Joji Otani-Hansen, Tara Raani, Taylor Kowalski, Taylor Sardoni
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Thriller | 3 Comments »
