Mystery

Knives Out (2019)

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Director: Rian Johnson

I love a good, old-fashioned cozy mystery. Knives Out isn’t a good one, however. It’s a great one. Writer/Director Rian Johnson channels his inner Agatha Christie to bring us the story of a dysfunctional family who discovers, the morning after the family patriarch’s birthday party, that said patriarch lies dead, his throat cut, in what appears to be a gruesome suicide. But this is no ordinary patriarch; this is Harlan Thrombey, multi-millionaire mystery writer, played by Christopher Plummer. And it soon becomes evident that it may not be a suicide, thanks to the presence of Consulting Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, doing Sherlock Holmes, by way of Hercule Poiroit, by way of…well, someone with an outrageous southern accent).

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Share (2019)

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Director: Pippa Bianco

The second film I watched today (after To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) is another film about teens, but they couldn’t be more different. Share is darker, both in subject matter and in execution. In it, sixteen-year-old Mandy (outstanding newcomer Rhianne Barreto) comes to one night on her front lawn. She’s clearly been drinking, and taking stock of her body, she finds bruises and other signs that indicate that something physical must have happened to her earlier in the night. The trouble is, she doesn’t remember anything. The next evening, though, she gets bombarded by texts from classmates telling her how sorry they are and asking if she’s okay. She doesn’t know what they’re talking about until one of them sends a blurry video, taken by someone at the party she attended. In it, Mandy is unconscious and surrounded by several boys, one of whom has pulled down her pants, exposing her bare bottom. They’re laughing and making comments and then the video stops.

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Dead Body (2017)

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A bunch of recent high school grads get together for an outing in a cabin in the woods. Later that evening, someone suggests the game “Dead Body,” a party game where one player is assigned to be the murderer, and one the first victim. The rest of the players have to figure out who the killer is before they become victims themselves. You can guess what happens next. Wait! Let me try that again in my horror trailer voice-over voice: “The kids decide to play ‘Dead Body,’ but what they don’t know is that someone’s already playing it…for real!”

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Summer of 84 (2018)

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Summer of 84, directed by the team of François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, has many of the elements of an ‘80s teen movie: a Tangerine Dream-like score, a clubhouse where the guys hang out, the archetypal group of friends including the troubled friend with the shitty home life, who puts up a tough exterior (Judah Lewis), the idyllic façade of suburban life, even the fantasy blonde girl next door (Tiera Skovbye), who always seems to be changing in front of her bedroom window. This is much darker than films from that era, though. It’s Stand By Me meets Rear Window.

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The Conjuring (2013)

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(Originally from Facebook – August 8, 2013)

As I said to a friend recently, “The Conjuring was so creepy, I nearly conjured a load in my shorts.” I was kidding, but only just. Horror is one of those genres in which there’s such a glut of options that most of them are bound to suck. This isn’t one of them. James Wan keeps proving that he knows how to create films that scare us. I feel like he’s moved away from the sheer gore of his Saw series (which frankly became cartoonish after a while), and found a much deeper creepy. His previous film Insidious was more frightening, I think (although not by much), but this one is more mature, and doesn’t have the third act issues that the former had. Continue reading →

Now You See Me (2013)

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(Originally from Facebook – August 3, 2013)

Sigh. I wanted to like this one. A caper film. With magic. Should have been right up my alley. But I forgot about the Eisenberg Principle, which is that whenever I see Jesse Eisenberg in a film, I have an overwhelming desire to punch him in the face…repeatedly. Here, he was at his face-punchingly worst. Add to that a lack of verisimilitude, a twist that you ought to see coming well before it arrives, and a completely unnecessary (and undeveloped) romantic subplot, and I was underwhelmed. It did have potential, but to my mind, the final third went off the rails. It’s getting a good score at IMDB (7.4), but maybe that’s just misdirection. 😉 I’m giving it a 4.5, with the expectation that many people are going to disagree. (running time 1:55)

Oblivion (2013)

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(Originally from Facebook – July 31, 2013

I’m going to end this trifecta on a good note. The #3 entry is the post-apocalyptic sci-fi film, Oblivion. Let me tell you, the Church of Scientology should just replace whatever holy document they have with a picture of Tom Cruise. Then, whenever someone makes fun of it, or wants to know why they should join, they could just hold up that picture. The guy is constantly impressing me, not only with his performances, but also with things such as his stunt work. Did you SEE him running around outside that building in MI: Ghost Protocol?? It’s got to be difficult to do that because of the great heights involved, and also because it’s got to be hard to move so fluidly with the giant set of balls he must have to do it in the first place. Add to that the fact that he seems to actually be aging in reverse, and it’s hard not to be impressed. But I digress…

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Enemy (2013)

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Wow. This is my favorite movie of the year so far, which is really surprising because—and I say this in all seriousness—I’m not sure I understand it. It’s like a Hitchcockian thriller, if Hitch was a huge fan of Kafka. It is a marvelous, mysterious, psychological thriller, and it really did remind me of Hitchcock’s psychological thrillers. The one thing that really sealed the comparison for me was the score. Continue reading →

The Treatment (2014)

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A really solid police thriller from Belgium that borders on horror. It doesn’t quite have the atmosphere of a Se7en or Prisoners, but it reminds me a little of those films (especially the latter).  I won’t lie to you—the subject matter is dark, which makes it hard to watch, but it’s not overly gory. Think of it as something along the lines of some of the British three-episode dramas out there.

The story seems fairly simple: a detective investigates the abduction of a young boy, but there are a number of twists and turns along the way to keep it interesting, and to keep you guessing. And to complicate matters, the detective himself watched his brother abducted before his eyes as a child, so his judgment is questionable.

Geert Van Rampelberg does a decent job as the haunted investigator, and the villain—the “Troll”—is one of the most unhinged since John Doe. You may think you know where this one is going, but it will spin you a couple of times before you get there.

IMDB gives it a 7.5, but I’m inclined to bump it up to an 8.0, as I could see this one being a contender for my “best of” list. (running time 2:11)