Thriller Archives - Page 12 of 67

Fantasia Festival ’18: Knuckleball

August 2, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Horror, Thriller

**/****screenplay by Kevin Cockle, Michael Petersondirected by Michael Peterson by Bill Chambers In the wintry Knuckleball, 12-year-old Henry (Luca Villacis) is sent to stay with his maternal grandfather, Jacob (Michael Ironside, looking huskier these days), while his parents (Kathleen Munroe and Chenier Hundal) attend a funeral. I don't entirely understand why Henry can't go with them, but it's an opportunity for him to spend time with Jacob, who hasn't, up 'til now, met the boy, owing to his mother's estrangement from her father. Ironside is as imposing as ever, and if you've followed his career at all the first third…

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

July 28, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

***/****
starring Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw As the title flatly states, Mission: Impossible: Fallout (hereafter Fallout), the sixth instalment in our very own Jackie Chan’s signature series, will be about Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) emotional baggage, earned over twenty-plus years of saving the world from threats foreign, domestic, and auteur. The main personal casualty for Hunt is the disintegration of his marriage to Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who must remain a “ghost” so that she doesn’t suffer the, yes, fallout from Ethan’s hero work. She checks in every once in a while, Hunt’s teammate Luther (Ving Rhames) tells Ethan’s new flame, former MI6 agent Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson). It’s what keeps Ethan going. Accordingly, Fallout starts with an apocalyptic dream of Julia in the hands of maddog terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris)–the type of dream James Cameron used so effectively in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where everyone turns to charcoal and flies apart. It’s important to focus in on all of this because Fallout is about a very specific element of the myth of masculinity, this romanticizing of sacrifice and suffering that men must go through in order to protect the women in their lives. The best part of Martin Campbell’s extremely good Casino Royale is when fatale Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) brings Bond (Daniel Craig) back from the dead and his first sentence is spent asking if she’s okay. There’s a scene like that at the end of Fallout as well when Hunt, back from the dead, apologizes to Julia for everything. It’s the sentiment and the situation that makes men in the audience spring a manly leak. Hunt–even his name is a primordial gender assignation–is the avatar for male expectation, which casts his heroics in an odd light, I think: fantasies of male heroism played against grandiose, extravagant, paranoid delusions. I don’t know now if I’m talking about Cruise or Hunt. Same, same.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Rondo

July 27, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** written and directed by Drew Barnhardt by Walter Chaw Hypehante Drew Barnhardt's sophomore feature Rondo is vile, amateurish garbage that fails largely because it's so pleased with itself. It features narration ripped off in style and intent from Todd Field's Little Children, of all things, giving its set-up a kind of arch distance, but what begins as moderately clever reveals itself to be a desperate way to provide exposition when dialogue, character work, and camera movement have failed. Rondo follows Boone (Grant Benjamin Leibowitz), a junkie crashing on his sister Jill's (Breanna Otts) couch, visiting a sex party…

The Equalizer 2; The First Purge; Superfly (2018)

July 26, 20182018, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

THE EQUALIZER 2
**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Melissa Leo
written by Richard Wenk
directed by Antoine Fuqua

THE FIRST PURGE
**/****
starring Y’lan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, Joivan Wade, Marisa Tomei
screenplay by James DeMonaco
directed by Gerard McMurray

SuperFly
**½/****
starring Trevor Jackson, Jason Mitchell, Michael Kenneth Williams, Lex Scott Davis
written by Alex Tse, based on the screenplay by Phillip Fenty
directed by Director X

by Walter Chaw McCall (Denzel Washington) is Batman. He has a tragic past and a tortured rationale, a sense of morality in a fallen world that aligns him with the hardboiled detectives proliferating American popular culture in the immediate aftermath of WWII. He was Dirty Harry Callahan or Paul Kersey in the late-’70s-into-’80s. No coincidence Death Wish has already gotten its own remake. No coincidence, either, a series interested in a theoretical near-future in which a day of mayhem is sanctioned by the government in order to facilitate a “purging” of intra-cultural aggression has received four instalments and an upcoming television series. The latest, The First Purge, serves as a “prequel” to the events of the first film. It’s also, full confession, the first of these movies that I’ve seen. I thought the premise was interesting, don’t get me wrong, I just didn’t really have the stomach for it. I feel the same way about that new Mr. Rogers documentary, or The Cove. The world is awful. I get it. There’s a limit to how often I want to be reminded of what we’ve lost. What’s curious about The First Purge (and the Superfly reboot) is not that all its heroes (save one) are Black and all its villains are white, but rather that its relationship to something like The Equalizer 2 mimics the relationship between “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World”. One provides a kind of cross-cultural reassurance that minorities are interested in the restoration of the ruling culture; the other understands the ruling culture was never threatened in the first place. Sure, subcultures evolve in the shadow of the social order, but the social order itself remains implacable and immutable.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Lifechanger

July 25, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Christmas, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**/****
written and directed by Justin McConnell

by Bill Chambers Emily (Elitsa Bako) lies naked in bed next to her own desiccated corpse. She returns home to a fretting boyfriend (Adam Buller) who says she's been missing for days. Against her wishes he calls the police to tell them she's returned, so she sticks a corkscrew in his neck. She's already beginning to decay, though. When Detective Freddie Ransone (Steve Kasan) pops 'round to see whether she's turned up yet, she takes the opportunity to snatch herself a new meat-cage: his. It's a lather-rinse-repeat pattern the movie soon establishes, as unidentified lifeform "Drew" identity-hops around the city at Christmastime. Lifechanger is a bit like The Hidden without anyone on screen trying to hunt down the alien, whose materialist appetites are here replaced by lovesickness. Drew retains his personal memories in addition to inheriting those of his hosts, although he doesn't really have any use for the latter. We know this partly due to Drew's narration (read by horror mainstay Bill Oberst Jr.)–a cue perhaps taken from Peter Watts's fabulous short story "The Things," which gives voice to the shapeshifter of John Carpenter's The Thing. By virtue of this innovation and all the mortal angst he expresses Drew becomes the most human character on screen, but then again his thoughts do tend to be dismayingly prosaic and expository for something not of this earth.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Cam

July 21, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

**/****screenplay by Isa Mazzeidirected by Daniel Goldhaber by Walter Chaw Daniel Goldhaber's e-take on the doppelgänger mythos via Harlan Ellison's "Shatterday," Clive Barker's "Mortal Remains," and that second-season episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" called "The Case of Mr. Pelham," asks what could happen if the Internet developed the ability to clone anyone once they uploaded enough extant video footage. Of course this is already mostly possible, and of course this new technology's main utility has been creating celebrity-fakes porn--which Cam addresses, though not well. It looks good and hero Lola ("She was a showgirl") is game, but while it threatens…

Fantasia Festival ’18: The Vanished

July 21, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Mystery, Revenge, South Korea, Thriller

**½/****written and directed by Lee Chang-hee by Bill Chambers A hit in its home country of South Korea earlier this year, The Vanished is a nominal ghost story in which a high-profile corpse disappears from the morgue. On the case is Detective Woo Jung-sik (Kim Sang-kyung), a washed-up alcoholic with the requisite Tragic Past (his fiancée was killed a decade earlier in a hit-and-run), which has put a pretty big chip on his shoulder for perps who might be getting away with murder. Like, say, college professor Park Jin-han (Kim Kang-woo), the "trophy" husband of the missing dead woman (Kim…

You Were Never Really Here (2018) – Blu-ray + Digital

July 16, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Judith Roberts, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Lynne Ramsay, based on the book by Jonathan Ames
directed by Lynne Ramsay

by Walter Chaw It opens with a child’s voice saying that he must do better. It’s dark. The first image is of a man trying to breathe inside a plastic bag. This is your everyday Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), and this is how director Lynne Ramsay lets us know that he’s disturbed. We know he’s dangerous, too, because she shows him cleaning the head of a ball-peen hammer and flushing bloody towels down a hotel-room toilet in a visceral call-back to the nightmare’s resolution in The Conversation. All of You Were Never Really Here is a nightmare: a vision of the United States presented by a foreign artist who sees America in the truest way since Wim Wenders’s pictures about violence, Edward Hopper (whom Ramsey uses as a touchstone, too), and the state of the American dream state. When she evokes “Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1” (a.k.a. Whistler’s Mother), capturing Joe’s mother (Judith Roberts) in profile through a window as her son goes to collect some bounty, it’s sad in the ineffable way that great art can be in just a pass, a glance. Ramsey’s picture is about the toll of violence on the violator and the victim in equal measure. In moments, she recreates Michael Mann’s urban veneers–nowhere more so than during the title sequence, whose soundtrack evokes not only that halcyon period in the ’80s when Tangerine Dream seemed to be scoring all the best movies, but also the band specifically in how their best scores were about the repetitive urgency of work. Jonny Greenwood’s music for You Were Never Really Here provides subtext, texture, and emotional geography. It reminds of Jon Brion’s work on Punch-Drunk Love. In a lot of ways, that PT Anderson film, in its discussion of a disturbed and volatile young man finding purpose and acceptance, is this picture’s closest analogue.

Hereditary (2018)

June 15, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne
written and directed by Ari Aster

by Walter Chaw There’s a feeling nagging at the back of my head that writer-director Ari Aster doesn’t have another round in his chamber–that Hereditary, his feature-length debut, is a canny Frankenstein’s monster of great horror moments sewn together expertly onto the trunk of Ordinary People. What I’m saying is that it literalizes the familial demons of Ordinary People, and in so doing diminishes them. It’s a cheap, mean cop-out. It’s an altogether ignoble thing for supernatural horror to be the literal, not metaphorical, explanation for familial dysfunction. There’s a definite lack of ownership involved here, and the tremendous cast is thus betrayed by the film in which they find themselves. Reckless, feckless, the very definition of nihilistic, Hereditary is a marvellous technical achievement that feels too much like a calling card and too little like the cri de cœur I think it’d like you to believe it is. Even in the middle of its harrowing ending (and it is harrowing, don’t get me wrong), there was a moment I stepped out of the film for a second to admire how “clean” it felt: a movie about the worst things you can ever imagine that I’d feel pretty good recommending to people. I was reminded of an interview with the late Jonathan Demme conducted around the time of The Silence of the Lambs where he talks about finding the line beyond which you’d lose the audience for being too frank in your depiction of atrocity. Hereditary is calculated in the same way. It’s the movie about the unspeakable that everyone can agree on; the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland, renamed “My Mother Never Loved Me.” It’s a fun ride, but it leaves a weird aftertaste. In many ways, Hereditary is the quintessential horror film of the Trump administration.

The Hurricane Heist (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

June 10, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Toby Kebbell, Maggie Grace, Ryan Kwanten, Ben Cross
screenplay by Scott Windhauser and Jeff Dixon
directed by Rob Cohen

by Bryant Frazer The Hurricane Heist gets down to business from the moment the opening credits appear on a dark screen and we hear the rumble of thunder on the soundtrack. It’s 1992, and Hurricane Andrew is slamming the fictional town of Gulfport, Alabama, making orphans of two young boys named (no kidding) Will and Breeze, who watch helplessly through the windows of a farmhouse as their papa is flattened by debris. As the storm clouds recede, they clearly resolve the features of a demonic face, laughing at the children from the heavens. (I think I said this out loud in my living room: “Wow.”) Fast-forward to the present day, where a guilt-racked Breeze (Ryan Kwanten) is sleeping his way through days and nights as a handyman (and ladies’ man) while semi-estranged brother Will (Toby Kebbell) has earned himself a job as a synoptic meteorologist–that is, he drives around in a weather-nerd Batmobile, analyzing storm fronts and predicting their impact, determined that the skies will mock him no more. Bringing the high concept to this pity party is new-in-town treasury agent Casey Corbyn (Maggie Grace), who happens to be charged with protecting $600 million of U.S. currency earmarked for destruction at a government facility. Unfortunately for her, the paper shredder is temporarily offline, and there are villains about who plan to use the cover provided by an incoming hurricane to make off with the cash before it can be destroyed. It gets a little complicated–the money ends up locked in an impenetrable vault inside the compound and Casey ends up outside, tooling around with Will. Together, they need to foil the robbery and rescue the hapless Breeze, who is being held hostage inside as the winds grow stronger and stronger.

Escape Plan (2013) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

June 4, 20182013, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Mystery, Prison, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Stallone, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Caviezel, Amy Ryan
screenplay by Miles Chapman and Arnell Jesko
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Bryant Frazer Escape Plan, a breezy prison-break yarn with a sci-fi gloss and cursory nods to post-9/11 geopolitics, would scarcely merit a footnote in the career histories of everyone involved if not for its rare alignment of celestial bodies: Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in leading roles, playing gently against type in a wry bromance that adds just enough spirit to freshen up the overly familiar action proceedings. Sly is Ray Breslin, a security consultant who specializes in breaking out of penal facilities in order to demonstrate their flaws to the people operating them–mostly, it seems, federal maximum-security prisons. When the CIA asks for Ray’s help stress-testing an entirely new kind of facility designed to incarcerate Very Bad Men (they’re referred to as “the worst of the worst,” and terrorists is the implication), it’s not clear whether it’s the sizable cash payday or the implied challenge of the assignment that he finds most tempting. Either way, he’s in. Trouble is, the offer wasn’t on the level. We learn that his client intends to prove the prison is escape-proof by keeping Breslin entombed within its walls, ignoring his safe words, smashing his GPS tracker, and using his own how-to-build-a-prison rulebook against him. Just when all seems lost, the conversational advances of fellow inmate Emil Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger) suggest the beginning of a beautiful friendship–and maybe a way for Breslin to bust both of them out of the big house.

The 15:17 to Paris (2018) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 29, 20182018, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos, Anthony Sadler, Judy Greer
screenplay by Dorothy Blyskal, based on the book by Sadler, Skarlatos, Stone and Jeffrey E. Stern
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Bill Chambers The 15:17 to Paris is quintessential late-period Clint Eastwood, its emphasis on the procedural and the quotidian seeming at once a calculated rebuke to commercialism, vivid demonstration of what a crapshoot Eastwood’s philosophy of shooting the first draft is, and proof that he has no desire to rest on his laurels as he nears the age of 90. The choices this movie makes can be so surreally unconventional, however, as to be vaguely ominous; I hope Eastwood’s okay. The 15:17 to Paris is based on the would-be hijacking of a train bound for Paris in 2015, and the three Americans who subdued the lone-wolf terrorist–Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, and Alek Skarlatos–play themselves. (It’s a postmodern ploy that everyone from Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up) to Betty Thomas (Howard Stern’s Private Parts) has attempted, though Eastwood probably had in mind Audie Murphy starring as himself in To Hell and Back, the big-screen adaptation of Murphy’s own WWII memoir.) That being said, more experienced actors inhabit the roles in an opening childhood flashback, while Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer play Spencer’s and Alek’s mom, respectively, and other recognizable faces, including Jaleel White and Tony Hale, fill out the supporting cast. Yet when the vérité shenanigans begin in earnest, Greer and Fischer are still there as the real men’s mothers–and, incidentally, haven’t aged a day. This is far from as peculiar as things get, but it induces a cognitive dissonance that turns out to be fairly typical of the movie’s tone. Watching The 15:17 to Paris is like falling into a low-key fugue state.

The 39 Steps (1935) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 22, 2018****/****, 1930s, 2018, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Road Movie, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Manheim, Godfrey Tearle
adaptation by Charles Bennett, dialogue by Ian Hay, based on the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Following the success of 1934’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock and his once-inseparable screenwriter Charles Bennett took to adapting John Buchan’s 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps as a breathless, sometimes-madcap chase flick employing a MacGuffin of many possibilities. The picture opens at the vaudeville act of one Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson): ask him a question and he’ll answer it–a human search engine and the centre of a film dealing with the very Hitchcockian theme of performance and how it keeps at bay, uneasily, the teeming chaos beneath the surface. In the middle of his act, a gunshot rings out and the audience, already unruly, crushes for the exits. Men first, old women–one in particular–trampled in the panic. Hitchcock’s cosmology is aligned with Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” suspended as it were above anarchy and animalism by the thinnest of agreements among men to engage in civilization. I don’t think Hitchcock disdains order–I think he mistrusts it. It’s the root of his Wrong Man issues, no less despairing in its fatalism than Edgar Allan Poe’s expectation/fear of premature burial. The critic Howie Movshovitz gave perhaps the best, certainly the most succinct, summary of Hitchcock’s world of Catholic transference and Original Sin: “Everyone’s got it coming.”

The Commuter (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 23, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Sam Neill
screenplay by Byron Willinger & Philip De Blasi and Ryan Engle
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I love a good train movie. Most of them since the publication of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express have combined elements of the drawing-room mystery with comedy, and I guess my problem with The Commuter is that it’s more perplexing and silly than intriguing and witty. In addition, by taking place aboard a commuter train, it clarifies why long-distance trains are the genre’s preferred setting, because not only do the latter provide, with their dining cars and their sleeping compartments, a richer visual backdrop, but they also don’t have to keep stopping every few minutes to let people out, imposing commercial breaks on the narrative. In short, long-distance trains are cinema, commuter trains are TV. That’s probably a derogatory and even borderline-meaningless distinction now, yet The Commuter is ephemeral in a way that B-movies often aren’t but episodic television of the franchised-to-death sort that keeps networks afloat these days typically is. I have this abstract wish that it was “better,” mainly because this is Liam Neeson’s purported departure from the action genre, the moribund mainstream division of which he single-handedly revived. He deserves a less anticlimactic send-off.

A Quiet Place (2018)

April 10, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Bryan Woods & Scott Beck and John Krasinski
directed by John Krasinski

by Walter Chaw John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place is exactly the type of inoffensive, about-nothing movie full of beautiful people and empty jumps that is popular for a short while specifically for its yawning blandness. It’s a horror film that acts as a security blanket: the world may be over, but aren’t they a cute couple? Everything done in this movie has been done before, sometimes better, sometimes worse, meaning essentially that the horror audience has already figured out what the solution is ten minutes in while it takes the idiots in the movie another hour or so. That’s too bad. A Quiet Place is so unmoored from anything like subtext or complexity that without a keenly intelligent and efficient script, its seams start to show almost immediately. Yet the instinct is to forgive it for a while because the cast is exceptional; the chemistry between Krasinski’s paterfamilias Lee and wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski’s real-life wife) is effortless and true, and the kids, Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Regan (Wonderstruck‘s Millicent Simmonds), are attractive enough that it wouldn’t be entirely awesome to see them murdered by space mantises. Well, it would, but, despite an early development, A Quiet Place isn’t that kind of movie.

Red Sparrow (2018)

March 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons
screenplay by Justin Haythe, based on the book by Jason Matthews
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw “Degenerate,” a young woman says during class in self-described Russian Whore School, turning away from a surveillance image in which a middle-aged diplomat is seen snuggling a younger man in a car. “Why do you say that,” asks her teacher, a frightening harridan out of a Wertmüller fandango played by Charlotte Rampling (who else?), “is it because he’s homosexual?” It is. And here he is, dragged into the classroom by scary Soviet guards. The young woman is brought to the front of the class and instructed to fellate him, since what’s “between [her] legs” is obviously of no interest to the degenerate homosexual. For his part, the prisoner grunts like an animal as he wrestles his dick out of his pants and does his best to force the girl’s mouth onto it. Let’s take a moment to consider that Francis Lawrence’s ugly, punishingly violent, ultimately despairing Red Sparrow has characterized this gay guy as a sub-vocal animal interested in getting a hummer from this barely-adult woman–and the Russians as subhuman operators interested in training their youth in the art of fucking for the Motherland. It’s not despicable to depict bigotry; it’s despicable to be bigoted.

Annihilation (2018)

February 26, 20182018, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Oscar Isaac
written by Alex Garland, based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer
directed by Alex Garland

by Walter Chaw

‘But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’
–Virginia Woolf, The Waves

This is what I said. I said, “If you survive, you are this rare thing. We are members of an endangered species, you and I, born with this romance for self-destruction. Most of us don’t survive, or survive as something else. But if you do survive, in thirty years, maybe you find yourself across from someone your age now, telling them that there’s more to their story if they choose to read on. And it’s the most wonderful thing and it’s worth the pain of getting there.”

Hell or High Water (2016) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

February 19, 20182016, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Thriller, Western

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham
written by Taylor Sheridan
directed by David Mackenzie

by Bryant Frazer Cops and criminals may clash on desolate West Texas landscapes, but late capitalism is the real enemy in Hell or High Water. The film declares its intentions in an elaborate opening shot that follows a weary-looking woman arriving for work in the morning as a 1987 Chevy Camaro circles the parking lot in the background. (Her right wrist is in a brace, probably to fend off carpal tunnel syndrome, that occupational hazard of retail clerks and bank tellers everywhere.) The camera catches three lines of graffiti on the side of a building–“3 TOURS IN IRAQ BUT NO BAILOUT FOR PEOPLE LIKE US”–as it dollies past before panning around more than 270 degrees to the left and pushing forward as our working woman heads towards the front of the Texas Midland Bank. Clearly visible through an architectural frame-with-a-frame created by the camera move are inlaid brick patterns in the shape of three crosses on a wall across the street. Just like that, director David Mackenzie establishes, first, the idea that the men in that blue Camaro are up to no good; second, the current of economic desperation driving screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s story; and third, the religious posturing that offers an alternative to existential despair, with roadside churches, TV evangelists, and Christian radio offering a relentless white-noise stream of piety on demand to an American underclass with nowhere left to turn.

Dial M for Murder (1954) – Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray

February 11, 20181950s, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Thriller

**/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, Robert Cummings, John Williams
screenplay by Frederick Knott, as adapted from his play
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw I’ve never seen Dial M for Murder in 3-D, but I can imagine how, in that format, Hitchcock’s slow push-ins and dolly-outs would create a habitable space, perhaps a sense of looming menace in his flower vases and teapots and of course the scissors with which poor Margot (Grace Kelly) manages to save herself late one night. In 2-D, Dial M for Murder is literally and figuratively flat: an adaptation of a smash stage play that Hitchcock transplanted without much “opening up”–a dry run for sister film Rear Window, a more polite rounding off of Rope, and what I have to believe was another visual/tonal experiment in a different format. How else to explain its complete airlessness in the middle of the Master’s masterpiece period? Maybe it was, as Hitch described it to Truffaut, a piffle, a contract film peeled off to appease Warner Bros.: “Coasting, playing it safe.” His own words about it comprise a good chunk of the total scholarship on the picture, but in that brief, three-page section in Truffaut’s book-length interview with him, Hitch admits that he hollowed out a pit in the floor of the soundstage, the better to create relief in low-angle shots. In 3-D, the sense of forced intimacy as we as an audience engage eye-level with, body-level with, betwixt our urbane plotters and murderers could be both suffocating and grand. I had a dream once that I attended a screening of this film in 3-D in a large, velvet-lined auditorium. Freudians, take note.

The Foreigner (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo

January 22, 20182017, 2018, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, DVD, Jackie Chan, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by David Marconi, based on the novel The Chinaman by Stephen Leather
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw Martin Campbell’s The Foreigner, based on Stephen Leather’s novel The Chinaman, showcases the great, the incomparable, Jackie Chan as a grief-stricken man with a Special Forces past, galvanized into action when an IRA bomb kills his only, and last, daughter in a chichi London retail block. Having failed in his attempts to bribe London officials for names, Chan’s Quan, restaurateur/owner of The Happy Peacock, focuses his attentions on former IRA/Sinn Fein leader Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan). Quan terrorizes the terrorists, stakes them out at Hennessy’s farmhouse/fortress, and generally makes life miserable for everyone until he finds the people responsible for his daughter’s death. It’s a role that Liam Neeson would have played had there not been a recent hue and cry over yellowface and whitewashing, and so Chan, in the twilight of his action career, is forced into somewhat thankless service in a film that wants to be more like The Fourth Protocol than like Police Story. The Foreigner isn’t a great film, but it’s an interesting one for all its mediocrity.