Mystery Archives - Page 3 of 30 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Nope (2022) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

November 3, 20222022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version.

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw I don’t think you ever see the heroes getting hurt, but they limp around a lot, and I couldn’t stop wondering why. Just because it’s more dramatic to be out of breath and limpy? There’s a rule about not looking something in the eye, but I don’t know how the horses can obey it, or if horses look up and behind them when they run. I’ve never seen them do that, in any case. If there’s a rule about eyes, is the plan, in the end, to put eyes on the hood of that hoodie, and if it isn’t, why did he? I understand there’s a point being made here about how Hollywood doesn’t care about the people who work in it–especially minorities and child actors–once their usefulness has been used up, yet I worry if by equating their trauma with a television chimp who goes insane and starts eating faces that the analogy, assuming there is one, has gotten as out of control as the chimp. There’s a reveal that’s less a reveal of an important plot point than a reveal that the reveal of an important plot point was left out somewhere. There’s a powerful opening scene where something happens involving a nickel that is very effective up until the moment it’s explained, at which point it no longer makes sense; why did it do what it did and not what it does for the rest of the film? Is it attracted to movement? Noise? It seems like both–but if so, how are folks constantly escaping it by moving around and making noise? That picture she takes? It looks ridiculous and will be convincing to no one. Wouldn’t the camera and the film the famous cinematographer is shooting still be in one piece, like a black box, when the thing happens with the balloon? How is that the first balloon it’s ever seen or eaten? If I ate a balloon (and could, for instance, withstand multiple gravities of speed and possibly interstellar travel), would I explode?

See How They Run (2022)

September 15, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Mystery, Theatrical

**/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, David Oyelowo
written by Mark Chappell
directed by Tom George

by Walter Chaw TV director Tom George’s feature debut See How They Run is a Wes Anderson shrine decorated with screenwriter Mark Chappell’s theatre-brat deep cuts, which ultimately just leads one to ask what of it is its own. Set around a murder that takes place at the time of the 100^th performance of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, complete with original cast members Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) and Deila Sim (Pearl Chanda), the whole thing is a twee exercise in medium shots, split screens, and not much else. George and his production designers are gifted at creating clean, period-cozy environments, but all those acres of slick really do is demonstrate how money can buy a talented team of costumers and craftspeople in the pursuit of a recognizable veneer of prestige and quality. What it doesn’t do, at least in this case, is provide the courage and the vision–perhaps it’s experience and wisdom–to tell a story that isn’t all surface pleasures. The real problem is that See How They Run has nothing to say about the world, about people, or, frankly, about Agatha Christie or murder mysteries. It doesn’t even have all that much to say about itself. It’s more the elderly Catskills chic of “Only Murders in the Building” than the genuine social revisionism of Knives Out. It has its opportunities; it mostly ignores them. It’s a choice, and your mileage may vary.

TIFF ’22: The Eternal Daughter

September 14, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, TIFF, UK

***½/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Carly-Sophia Davies, Joseph Mydell, Alfie Sankey-Green
written and directed by Joanna Hogg

by Angelo Muredda Joanna Hogg follows up her autobiographical The Souvenir films with a formal digestif in The Eternal Daughter, which filters her usual thematic preoccupations with memory, space, and creation born of loss through the appropriate genre container of English ghost stories, with style and warmth to spare. A gently spooky, dryly funny, and mournful B-side to those films, as well as a companion piece to her earlier texts where personal relationships are tested away from home in rented villas (Unrelated) and cottages (Archipelago), the film stars Hogg’s childhood friend and frequent collaborator Tilda Swinton, who reprises her Souvenir role as an older version of patrician mother Rosalind while also standing in for her own daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, as Rosalind’s daughter Julie, a filmmaker who routinely mines her personal life in her artistic practice. Eager to finally learn more about her buttoned-up mother–and, Rosalind suspects, spin new work out of her stories–Julie treats Rosalind (and her dog) to a memory-jogging birthday stay at a mansion from her youth that’s now a deserted, mist- and foliage-enshrouded hotel occupied only by the brusque night clerk (brimming with eat-the-rich intensity by Carly-Sophia Davies) and kindly late-night groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell). The women exchange sad stories and pour over the stingy four items on the menu in the seemingly haunted hotel while the days and nights wear on, unceremoniously marked by their routines of dog-walking, pill-taking, and tiptoeing late at night amidst the mysterious sounds of an open window rattling in the wind.

Orphan: First Kill (2022)

August 19, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, Thriller

*½/****
starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Rossif Sutherland, Hiro Kanagawa, Julia Stiles
screenplay by David Coggeshall
directed by William Brent Bell

by Angelo Muredda “Esther’s terrifying saga continues,” promises the confusing promotional copy for William Brent Bell’s Orphan: First Kill, a listless prequel to Jaume Collet-Serra’s impressively nasty thriller Orphan. It says something about the project’s existential inertia that even the pitch is muddled about whether the film’s diminutive protagonist, played again with an appropriate mix of madame prudishness and girlish optimism by Isabelle Fuhrman, is coming or going. Arriving a whole 13-year-old’s lifespan after the original, which famously culminated in the reveal that Esther was not a helpless urchin from St. Mariana’s Home for Girls but a short, thirty-something serial killer from Estonia, Orphan: First Kill dilutes rather than develops the deliberately thin mythos of its predecessor, stretching its punchy 30-second exposition dump about her past into 100 minutes of deadweight.

Nope (2022)

July 21, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

The Trouble with Harry (1955) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 13, 2022****/****, 1950s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Edmund Gwenn, John Forsythe, Mildred Natwick, Shirley MacLaine
screenplay by John Michael Hayes, based on the novel by Jack Trevor Story
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Once I realized the person I’m supposed to suture with in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry is the title character, the middle of Hitchcock’s three dead protagonists (sandwiched between Rebecca‘s Rebecca de Winter and Psycho‘s Mother), the rest of the movie began to make sense to me. Not a literal sense where the characters’ behaviour is reasonable, thus making the narrative intelligible in a rational way, but an absurdist, Lewis Carroll nightmare sense, where language is revealed to be meaningless and unstable enough to destabilize perceptions of time and space as well. The Trouble with Harry casts Vermont in fall as Wonderland aswarm with madness and violence, lodged in a time-loop and peopled by a gallery of hatters and dormice (and even an Alice, completely over-the-rainbow insane) preserved in an autumnal, solipsistic amber of their own deconstructionist, semantic derangement. The closest analogues in movies are Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and Michel Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore: the former echoing The Trouble with Harry‘s thesis that if reality is defined by language, then reality is as subject to slippage as language; the latter harking back to this film’s snow-globe meta-fiction, where life and death play out its meaningless permutations in a philosophical exercise inside an alien terrarium. The Trouble with Harry would play well in a double-feature with Scorsese’s existentially terrifying After Hours. Godard’s Alphaville, too–a noir about the prison of words where every room contains a “bible,” which, in reality, is a dictionary with telltale words removed (like “poetry” and “love”), thereby eradicating them from the minds of a citizenry enslaved by a machine god.

Scream (2022) – Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 17, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, Wes Craven

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Melissa Berrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Neve Campbell
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s Scream cycle, in terms of its influence on modern film, constitutes the most important metatext of the last 25 years in that it’s not only self-referential, it’s curious about how self-reference can be an essential ontological tool as opposed to a mere existential exercise. They’re better movies, in this respect, than The Matrix and its sequels, and, at least in terms of their popularity, they’re more important than even Charlie Kaufman’s extraordinary but limited-appeal body of work. The Scream saga, for lack of a better word, matters. Not for nothing does Scream 3, despite being the weakest installment of the original four and the only one of those that didn’t involve Williamson in any significant way, take place mainly on a simulacrum of hero Sidney’s childhood home and neighbourhood, recreated inside a soundstage like the to-scale streets of Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. If the first film is a watershed, the second is perhaps the series’ masterpiece: a phenomenal bit of pop philosophy that sees Sidney (Neve Campbell) as a Cassandra figure, literally forced onto the stage with a pack of masked murderers to re-enact her trauma from and into eternity. It’s her role in these Passion Plays to be preyed upon–and through her suffering, the “rules” of engagement between women coming of sexual age and men wanting to possess and punish them for that are forged. She has become an archetype, a thing that is representative of a fundamental truth, and the movies understand that. When she makes her entrance in the new Scream (hereafter Scream 5), standing up in a hospital waiting area to greet a young woman initiated into the abattoir, it is framed and shot as though we are all in the presence of a divine visitation.

Dexter: New Blood (2021-2022) – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 20222021, 2022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Disability, Drama, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A Extras C+
“Cold Snap,” “Storm of Fuck,” “Smoke Signals,” “H is for Hero,” “Runaway,” “Too Many Tuna Sandwiches,” “Skin of Her Teeth,” “Unfair Game,” “The Family Business,” “Sins of the Father”

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a white buck. Dexter is tracking it through the woods, a regular Natty Bumppo. Though he has a clear shot, something stops him from pulling the trigger, and he falls to his knees in a parody of biblical defeat. A second attempt the following day is foiled when a sharp noise from elsewhere causes the wildlife to scatter, while a third and final try sees him lowering his rifle and surrendering to the beauty of the beast. Dexter and the white buck are kindred spirits–outliers of their species, yet built to blend into their surroundings. Trophies, ultimately, for their rarity. The premiere episode of “Dexter: New Blood”, “Cold Snap,” might be my favourite of the character’s entire television run, because it allows him this brief state of grace. There was a season of “Dexter” where he went searching for signs of a higher power, but it’s here that he finds one, and what makes this so different from our serial-killer Pinocchio’s previous real-boy epiphanies is that, for once, there’s no noise in his head. In fact, this most compulsive of narrators only starts talking to us again after the tranquillity of the moment is shattered, which is a surprisingly understated gambit for “Dexter”. It’s a crowd-pleasing thing, I suppose, when he finally pipes up (it’s Clark Kent ducking into a phone booth, or Popeye squeezing a can of spinach), but it plays to me as bitter commentary on how short-lived inner peace is these days for anyone with a moral compass–even one as faulty as Dexter’s.

Deep Water (2022)

March 17, 2022****/****, 2022, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Streaming, Thriller

****/****
starring Ben Affleck, Ana De Armas, Tracy Letts, Grace Jenkins
screenplay by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, based upon the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Walter Chaw Patricia Highsmith’s closest analogue in film for me is David Cronenberg–insect anthropologists, both, who see human beings in terms of their emotionless, biomechanical tics and repetitions. Her books are insidious things, death by quicksand or, like the protagonist of her short story “The Snail-Watcher,” drowned beneath a sea of the snails he keeps and breeds as objects of…well, it’s more than fascination. The hero of Highsmith’s Deep Water, Vic Van Allen, keeps snails, too. He names them, studies them, escapes to them when he can’t bear the company of his licentious wife, Melinda. He finds profundity in their couplings and multiplications as well as tragedy in their deaths, and he sees in them a corollary to his relationship with a wife he despises and a child he adores. Vic Van Allen can be understood entirely as an insect in a man’s clothing. He is slow, inexorable where Melinda is quicksilver, flighty, and resentful of their life together, seeking comfort and an escape of her own in a parade of lovers. At the root of it all, Highsmith is about forms of escape: the bomb shelters to which we retreat when stimulated, prodded, provoked like snails back into our shells.

Offseason (2022)

March 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jocelin Donahue, Joe Swanberg, Richard Brake, Melora Walters
written and directed by Mickey Keating

by Walter Chaw As her star-making performance in Ti West’s exceptional The House of the Devil will attest, Jocelin Donahue makes for a compelling lead. She has about her something of Famke Janssen’s quality of toughness that isn’t undermined by a vulnerability. Lately, Donahue has shown up here and there, doing good work in supporting roles in big films like To the Wonder and Doctor Sleep and taking larger roles in smaller projects like Mickey Keating’s Offseason, where her Marie is summoned back to the family reserve upon the desecration of a relative’s grave. That should’ve been her first warning. Her second is the grizzled local colour–like the Bridge Man (Richard Brake), who tells her and her asshole boyfriend, George (Joe Swanberg), that the island they’re trying to get to is about to have the bridge connecting it to the mainland raised for the season. “How do you close an island?” George wants to know. The better question is, will Offseason be able to lard Marie’s guilt about her relationship with her dead mother with enough gravity to serve as a metaphor for an entire Silent Hill village’s bargain with some nameless, Lovecraftian Deep One? And the answer is…complicated. I think a mother/daughter thing could have provided enough subtext had Keating been in better control of the story he’s telling. The pieces are there, like a payphone receiver left off the hook and swinging for pregnant seconds, but the connective tissue seems to be missing, as in how that missed connection on a dead technology relates to Marie’s inability to connect with mom Ava (Melora Walters) before Ava’s death. I like films that eschew exposition, but what a film lacks in exposition it must replace with a persistence of vision. Without it, it’s like when you drum out a “tune” with your fingers on a table and think that anyone else knows what you’re playing.

The Batman (2022)

February 28, 20222022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Colin Farrell
written by Matt Reeves & Peter Craig
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw I love Matt Reeves. I think Cloverfield is exceptional, that I underestimated Let Me In upon its initial release, and that, for as popular as it was, the Planet of the Apes trilogy–to which he contributed two entries–remains underappreciated for how cogent and incisive a satire it is of the doomed trajectory of our irredeemable state. Reeves appears to be the rare bird who can work within the framework of franchise and intellectual property and still manage to produce largely uncompromised pieces, unbeholden to stock set-ups and happy pay-offs. I had the highest of hopes for his turn at the wheel of the Batman machine: if anyone was going to do a down Batman in defiance of the jealous protectors of a billion-dollar money tree, it was Reeves. Alas, The Batman is overlong, over-serious, poorly-paced, and the first of Reeves’s films to show obvious production interference in the sort of narrative post-script–delivered via world-weary Blade Runner voiceover, no less–that is never not embarrassing for its awkward pandering. Any sins of structure can at least be attributed to Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig, who lean heavily on the “detective” part of Batman’s “Dark Knight Detective” moniker in an earnest, all-in go at neo-noir. But the grafted-on epilogue suffers an instant, gaudy tissue rejection. It’s sap in a movie that, for all its gravid clumsiness, has decidedly not been sap.

Scream (2022)

January 15, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Melissa Berrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Neve Campbell
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

Malignant (2021) – Blu-ray + Digital Code

December 5, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw James Wan’s Malignant is spectacularly, unabashedly fucking nuts. Not nuts in a random way, nuts in the way Oliver Stone’s The Hand is–or, more to the point, Brian De Palma’s Sisters. It’s what the Dario Argento The Phantom of the Opera should have been: not entirely giallo, not without elements of high opera; a classic “madwoman” picture as well as a possession movie. Also, that voice on the phone from Black Christmas, and also a loving homage to Stuart Gordon, and also… Malignant is a joyful mishmash that plays like a NOW That’s What I Call Music compilation for horror fans. It’s the North by Northwest of delirious genre fare: Bava if you want it, the most gothic Hammer if it pleases you, complete with a Universal Monsters monster I kind of can’t believe someone hasn’t done before. I’m not giving anything away by saying the cosplay is going to be lit.

Malignant (2021)

September 13, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by James Wan

Super 8 (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy|Super 8 – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

September 2, 20212011, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/****
BD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
4K UHD – Image B Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw J.J. Abrams’s Spielberg shrine Super 8 mines the birth-of-the-blockbuster nostalgia vein so doggedly that you actually wish it was better than it is. Still, what works about it works really well, the best result of it being that it offers a vehicle for young Elle Fanning that should catapult her to the real superstardom Somewhere would have had anyone seen it. She’s stunning; every second she’s on screen, no matter whether she’s sharing the frame with a two-storey monster, it’s impossible to look away from her. She’s the natural lens-flare Abrams offsets with his trademark visual tick. Fanning’s Alice, the daughter of town drunk Louis (Ron Eldard), is enlisted by a pack of Goonies-stratified youngsters to be the female lead in their kitchen-sink zombie flick. The erstwhile director is the Stand By Me chubby one Charles (Riley Griffiths), and along for the ride are the one who pukes (Gabriel Basso) and the one who likes to blow shit up (Ryan Lee). And, yes, there’s that scene where the kids throw their stuff over a fence, gather up their bikes, and recreate an entire sequence from the Amblin Entertainment logo that opens the picture.

Fantasia Festival ’21: When I Consume You

August 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery

**½/****
starring MacLeod Andrews, Evan Dumouchel, Libby Ewing
written and directed by Perry Blackshear

by Walter Chaw Living with addiction, Daphne (Libby Ewing) and Wilson (Evan Dumouchel) are siblings on the perpetual edge of destitution. They are each other’s only means of emotional and occasionally material support. As writer-director Perry Blackshear’s When I Consume You opens, Daphne spits blood and other viscera into a sink and yells through the bathroom door that she just needs a minute. She has a secret to hide, and her brother seems to be having a rough time of it, so maybe that’s why she’s not telling him whatever it is that’s going on with her. A lovely early scene that won me over, as it happens, sees Wilson having a panic attack and Daphne talking him through it. This depiction of the sibling relationship is intimate, empathetic, and authentic-feeling. There’ve been a few compelling sibling relationships anchoring horror films–I’m thinking of the brothers in The Lost Boys, or the brother/sister in Jeepers Creepers, and how those films similarly use threats to that relationship as empathy engine and maybe even as a metaphor for growing apart. A flashback in When I Consume You to, if not “happier,” at least earlier times, shows the pair working on a project together in a tight physical space talking about shared burdens and possible futures that we know are insurmountable on the one hand and doomed on the other. Affecting stuff, and it proves to be the central concern of When I Consume You after all the sound and fury burns off: It’s your siblings who know what you’ve been through; and maybe it’s your siblings who, for as much as they’re responsible for you holding on to your demons, will help you get past them, too.

Old (2021)

July 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff
screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan, based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan is a brilliant filmmaker and an arrogant storyteller, and sometimes that works out pretty well (see: The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable). More often, it yields wildly mixed results where his savant-like mastery of the visual wars with the pedantic, childish, even messianic tendencies of his writing. Imagine if Spielberg wrote all his own movies instead of merely tacking his tidy happy endings on them. There's possibly a paper in how the degree of obstreperousness in Shyamalan's cameos has a direct correlation to the film's obnoxiousness. My favourite Hitchcock cameo is in Notorious, where Hitch has himself drinking a glass of champagne at a party at a Nazi's house, thus, through a series of events, accelerating the discovery of our heroic secret agent. But Hitch never cast himself, as Shyamalan has, in extended speaking roles that have found him playing a prophet writing a new Bible (Lady in the Water), delivering key exposition in a protracted flashback (Signs), and serving as the beneficiary of the most complicated camera set-up to deliver the twist in an otherwise transfixing, transporting picture (The Village). Tarantino used to do garbage like that, and, predictably, this was reliably the worst part of a Tarantino movie. For a while, after Shyamalan went through a pronounced humbling (The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth), he cut the shit for a trio of tight, nasty, mostly-glorious, largely career-resuscitating little thrillers (The Visit, Split, Glass). With his latest, Old, he's got his confidence back, and that's…bad.

Spiral (2021)

June 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Spiral: From the Book of Saw
½*/****
starring Chris Rock, Max Minghella, Marisol Nichols, Samuel L. Jackson
written by Josh Stolberg & Peter Goldfinger
directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

by Walter Chaw It’s so familiar it’s fatiguing, another one of these projects that begins with passion and the best of intentions and ends up chewed to paste and regurgitated as this thin, masticated gruel. Is Darren Lynn Bousman’s Spiral (a.k.a. Spiral: From the Book of Saw) the product of too many notes from too many people, or simply the wrong people? Or maybe there weren’t enough voices in the room to challenge accepted wisdom, which tends to be unreliable more often than not. Spiral occupies a weird space where it’s both desperate and cocksure. In moments of duress, one tends to revert to the familiar and the comfortable, so when things are obviously going south for Chris Rock, still-aspiring movie star, Chris Rock, legendary stand-up comic, tries to assert himself. The script is a mess, and the grafts meant to save the patient have been rejected. Spiral probably should’ve been killed at inception.

The Woman in the Window (2021) – Netflix

May 18, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Streaming, Thriller

**/****
starring Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Julianne Moore
screenplay by Tracy Letts, based upon the novel by A.J. Finn
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw By the end of her career, after decades spent weathering abuse and disappointment, Joan Crawford turned in a series of extraordinarily nuanced performances playing older women doing their best against despair. Watch the look on her face in Sudden Fear when a much-younger Jack Palance shows some interest in her, even after she’s been cruel to him–the mixture of hope and suspicion, the hard-won wisdom of a lifetime of betrayals at her expense. Crawford and legendary rival Bette Davis were slotted into stuff like this in their middle-age–an entire “psycho-biddy” subgenre of exploitation picture that, despite being engineered to humiliate them, nonetheless resulted in a few sublime gems made exceptional, some would correctly argue, for the unexpected dignity these women brought to the projects. Case in point, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?: come for the camp, stay for the devastating existential pathos. By any measure, 46 is not “biddy” territory, but that’s the age Crawford is in Sudden Fear (probably; no one knows for sure when Crawford was born). At 46, Davis reprised the role of Queen Elizabeth, this time well into her dotage, and, indeed, 46 is how old Amy Adams is in the role of drunk and doped-up, agoraphobic nutjob Dr. Anna Fox in Joe Wright’s ridiculous–but not ridiculous enough–The Woman in the Window.

Come Play (2020)

November 2, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Gillian Jacobs, John Gallagher Jr., Azhy Robertson, Winslow Fegley
written and directed by Jacob Chase

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see this movie in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw It’s difficult to know whether writer-director Jacob Chase’s feature debut Come Play means well or means ill; whether it’s an earnest attempt to discuss autism using a horror premise as metaphor for its impact on a family, or just a cheap rip-off of the already-cheap “Jung for Dummies” flick The Babadook. Even its execution vacillates between “super clumsy” and “surprisingly effective.” It’s like Come Play is at odds with itself–almost as though there were compromises made to get it made, and so what results is a possibly compelling premise with a couple of nice moments reduced to a derivative stock chiller that’s all the more frustrating for that promise. A horror movie about a creature haunting our various screens is at least timely, right? A Ringu update, perhaps. A Mercury Rising redux swinging drunkenly from unintentionally hilarious to probably-unintentionally offensive likely wasn’t the desired outcome.