Thriller Archives - Page 17 of 68

The Guardian (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

March 9, 20161990s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jenny Seagrove, Dwier Brown, Carey Lowell, Brad Hall
screenplay by Stephen Volk and Dan Greenburg and William Friedkin, based on the novel The Nanny by Greenburg
directed by William Friedkin

by Bryant Frazer The Guardian, made in 1990 as an apparent attempt to cash in on director William Friedkin’s reputation as the man behind The Exorcist, is one of those terrible movies by a powerful director working at the low ebb of his career. The wildest thing about The Exorcist–one of the greatest horror movies–is that despite its defining influence on his career, Friedkin has never shown much interest in horror. (That’s one of the things that makes The Exorcist work so well: Despite the requisite special-effects outlay required to depict demonic possession, on one level The Exorcist is just the story of a problem and the professionals who are dispatched to address it; on another level, it’s a family drama about a single parent dealing with adolescent rebellion.) So while it’s understandable that either Friedkin or the studio bankrolling The Guardian would see commercial potential in a return to genre filmmaking, any attempt at out-and-out horror was probably ill-fated from the start. That the story being attempted (loosely adapted from a novel by Dan Greenburg) was so very woolly–the supernatural villain the title references is a sexy, polymorphous druid who takes jobs as a live-in nanny to steal babies from their parents–would have been an advantage in, say, a potboiler out of Charles Band’s Empire Pictures. In the hands of a no-nonsense craftsman like Friedkin, alas, it was a blueprint for disaster.

Ghost Story (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

February 8, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., John Houseman
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen, based on the terrifying best-selling novel by Peter Straub
directed by John Irvin

by Walter Chaw Jack Cardiff’s reputation as a world-class cinematographer began, really, with the Archers, progressed through Hitchcock’s underestimated, and gorgeous, Under Capricorn (every inch as beautiful a film as Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and A Matter of Life and Death), and was maintained in collaborations with the likes of John Huston, Joe Mankiewicz, King Vidor, and Henry Hathaway. He did two films with John Irvin: the great Dogs of War, and this, 1981’s seedy, singularly unpleasant Ghost Story, which represents the final screen appearances of Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Melvyn Douglas. I think the biggest disappointment of the film is that it doesn’t look better, given Cardiff’s behind the camera. In fact, it looks like a TV movie (acts like one, too, as it happens); the possibilities of having Cardiff lens a classic ghost story in the gothic style are delicious and, until the last ten minutes or so, largely frustrated. Blame the picture’s settings, various brightly-lit exteriors and contemporary environments (office buildings, college campuses)–even when the movie is in a grand old house, our aged heroes’ Chow-duh Society huddled together in pools of shadow, scaring each other with spooky stories, the joke seems to be that someone is always turning on the lights.

The Dungeonmaster (1984)/Eliminators (1986) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

February 1, 20161980s, 2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Zombie

Ragewar
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Richard Moll, Leslie Wing, Jeffrey Byron
written by Allen Actor
directed by Rosemarie Turko, John Carl Buechler, David Allen, Steven Ford, Peter Manoogian, Ted Nicolaou, Charles Band

ELIMINATORS
**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Andrew Prine, Denise Crosby, Patrick Reynolds, Roy Dotrice
written by Paul De Meo & Danny Bilson
directed by Peter Manoogian

by Bryant Frazer Shout! Factory’s program of disinterred but well-preserved artifacts from producer Charles Band’s genre-flick factory Empire Pictures continues with this platter of aged cheese. I’m generally resistant to nostalgia and suspicious of claims that anybody’s low-budget crapfest is so bad it’s good, but the twofer on offer here is surprisingly engaging, juxtaposing a sloppy but fast-paced horror anthology with a silly but earnest action pastiche in a celebration of a bygone age of guileless indie filmmaking. While some of Scream Factory’s excavations from that era are simply depressing (The Final Terror, anyone?), this highly-derivative double feature makes up for its lack of artistry with a generous helping of vintage latex creature masks, boggling non sequiturs, and 1980s signifiers that generate–at least for movie buffs of a certain age and proclivity–a strong sense memory of sticky floors, stale popcorn, and battered 35mm projection.

The Finest Hours (2016)

January 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Eric Bana
screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson, based on the book by Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw Craig Gillespie makes a play to be the new Ron Howard by not only following up Ron Howard’s waterlogged maritime tale of dashing Captain Handsome and his feats of historical derring-do with his own, but also studiously crafting bland, empty, crowd-pleasing, middlebrow gruel for the sedate appreciation of people who are almost dead. Gillespie’s is The Finest Hours, the tale of a heroic small-boat Coast Guard rescue in 1951 off the coast of Nantucket that sees four really boring white guys putting out during a storm to save thirty waterlogged oil-tanker guys. The Finest Hours never for a moment made me not think of that SNL sketch where Mark Wahlberg asks a goat if it’s seen A Perfect Storm–which admittedly is not the worst thing that a film hasn’t been able to make me not think about.

The Good Dinosaur (2015); The Revenant (2015); The Hateful Eight (2015)

December 25, 20152015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Disney, Drama, Family, Mystery, Pixar, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
***/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

THE REVENANT
***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, a bear, angry junketeers
screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He’s clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him “Spot” (he’s a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film’s final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It’s far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

December 14, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, DVD, Espionage, Hong Kong, Morocco, Thriller, Tom Cruise, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw At some point, sneakily, wonderfully, Tom Cruise became our Jackie Chan. It happened when the storyline shifted away from his essential ickiness–the Scientology thing, the Katie Holmes thing, and all the attendant nightmare gossip–and onto his fearlessness and absolute willingness to perform his own stunts wherever possible. (I realize of course that said storyline may never shift for some.) There were murmurs when he did the rock-climbing in the second Mission: Impossible flick–the one where he recruited John Woo, who was at the time the best action director on the planet. Those murmurs turned to grudging admiration once it was revealed that Cruise let himself be suspended for real outside the Burj Khalifa in Brad Bird’s superior Ghost Protocol; and now, with Christopher McQuarrie’s fleet, intelligent, immanently professional Rogue Nation, for which Cruise hung from an airplane in flight and held his breath for six minutes, Cruise’s bravado is a big part of the draw.

Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995) [Collector’s Edition] + Tales from the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood (1996) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

November 30, 20151990s, 2015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire

Demon Knight
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett, Brenda Bakke
written by Ethan Reiff & Cyrus Voris & Mark Bishop
directed by Ernest Dickerson

Bordello of Blood
*/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras A
starring Dennis Miller, Erika Eleniak, Angie Everhart, John Kassir
screenplay by A.L. Katz & Gilbert Adler
directed by Gilbert Adler

by Walter Chaw I didn’t have HBO as a kid. Didn’t even have cable. When I went over to friends’ houses, I would spend a lot of time wanting to watch MTV to try to catch up on all the popular culture I was missing. “Remote Control”, the first Jon Stewart show, “Dream On”, “The Kids in the Hall”–each of them represent gaping holes in my pop education. Lump in the Walter Hill-produced “Tales from the Crypt” anthology program with that group of things I knew about but only by title and reputation. My first exposure to the EC Comics-inspired/adapted-from show was through reprints of “Tales from the Crypt” and “Strange Tales” comics during the early-’90s industry boom. Then Ernest Dickerson’s fantastic Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (hereafter Demon Knight) satisfied every single expectation I had of something seeking to honour the ghoulish, sometimes puerile depravity of William Gaines’s seminal source material. It’s as gory as it is corny and smart as hell for recognizing that those were the only requirements. Doesn’t hurt that the practical-effects work is goopy and inventive. Oh, and the cast is exceptional.

San Andreas (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 29, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, Drama, DVD, Thriller

Sanandreas1

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Carlton Cuse
directed by Brad Peyton

by Bryant Frazer Back in the 1970s, Hollywood thrillers broke a sweat trying to depict a single terrible event–just one burning building, overturned luxury liner, or airship disaster. These days, the imagery has gotten a lot more freewheeling. Armed with powerful computer algorithms that generate cartoonish eruptions of earth, fire, wind, and water, today’s VFX supervisors have a mandate to make bad things happen on screen–all of the bad things, preferably at the same time. In San Andreas, the terrible, horrible, no-good very bad day includes a disintegrating Hoover Dam and a container ship that cartwheels end-over-end into the Golden Gate Bridge. Skyscrapers collapse in on themselves, generating 9/11 flashback clouds of dust and debris that blast through city streets. A tsunami and its attendant flooding sends murky water pulsing through the floors of submerged high-rises, trapping helpless victims inside like goldfish behind glass. It would all be a little hard to take if the visual effects were more convincing (they’re cartoonish) or the action scenes at all naturalistic (ditto), but director Brad Peyton isn’t especially ambitious. His operative aesthetic is purely Theme Park.

Spectre (2015)

November 7, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, James Bond, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes
screenplay by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw My favourite James Bond movie is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: the first without Sean Connery as Bond, and the first and only featuring Australian model George Lazenby in the role. It’s the one where Bond falls in love, marries, and, in the end, is unable to protect his new bride from her demons. I like it the best because, despite a few typically silly Bond moments, it has Bond’s Moriarty, Blofeld (Telly Savalas in that film), acting as the spear in our hero’s side, and it has Bond attempting to address his own failures as a human being and being taught, essentially, that the world is a cold place. I like it the best because it feels melancholy and hopeless. Bond is psychotic, you see, a serial philanderer and killer given license to do both by a broken state and the illusion of order. He’s a rapist in Fleming’s novels (and consider the conquest of Pussy Galore in Goldfinger)–literally in some instances, in others just given to taking advantage of women in extremis. It’s a very particular ruling-class fantasy punctuated by gadgets and automobiles–film noir, except the code our ambiguous hero plays by is more Humphrey Bogart’s from In a Lonely Place than Bogey’s from The Maltese Falcon.

Nightbreed: The Director’s Cut (1990) [Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack] + Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions (1995) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

November 1, 20151990s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Clive Barker’s Nightbreed
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Craig Sheffer, Anne Bobby, David Cronenberg, Charles Haid
screenplay by Clive Barker, based on his novel Cabal
directed by Clive Barker

CLIVE BARKER’S LORD OF ILLUSIONS
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Scott Bakula, Kevin J. O’Connor, Famke Janssen, Daniel Von Bargen
written for the screen and directed by Clive Barker

by Walter Chaw Clive Barker’s too-brief directing career, capping his time as the Stephen King-anointed prince of horror (“I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker,” went King’s famous endorsement), produced three cult classics: Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions. His Hollywood trajectory traces the familiar tale of enfant terrible allowed full reign on his first project, only to find subsequent efforts bowdlerized by non-believers. Director’s cuts of Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions have circulated in some form over the years, with fans claiming–particularly in the case of Nightbreed–that masterpieces had been corrupted, hidden from sight. It’s the kind of intrigue that forms the basis of much of Barker’s work: the hidden grotto, arcane knowledge secreted away, art too beautiful for human eyes. There’s something of the fury of H.P. Lovecraft’s cult of personality in this–something more of the cosplay phenomenon. Each of Barker’s movies evokes the absolute acceptance that outsiders encounter at genre conventions: they are explosions of the internal, actings-out of repressed desires. Find in this explanation of the coda, surprisingly sticky despite the bad pun, to his short-story anthologies: “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.” Clive Barker is the Douglas Sirk of splatter.

The Food of the Gods (1976)/Frogs (1972) [Double Feature] + Empire of the Ants (1977)/Jaws of Satan (1981) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Discs

October 26, 20151970s, 1980s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

THE FOOD OF THE GODS
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Marjoe Gortner, Pamela Franklin, Ralph Meeker, Ida Lupino
screenplay by Bert I. Gordon, based on a portion of the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Bert I. Gordon

FROGS
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Adam Roarke
screenplay by Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees
directed by George McCowan

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Joan Collins, Robert Lansing, John David Carson, Albert Salmi
screenplay by Jack Turley, story by Bert I. Gordon, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Bert I. Gordon

King Cobra
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Fritz Weaver, Gretchen Corbett, Jon Korkes, Norman Lloyd
screenplay by Gerry Holland, from a story by James Callaway
directed by Bob Claver

by Jefferson Robbins If THE DISSOLVE had lasted, Keith Phipps’s fine recurring genre feature “The Laser Age” might have gotten around to the SF subcategory of Nature Gone Wild–the movies that set animals against humanity, such as The Swarm, Night of the Lepus, Squirm, and Prophecy (The Monster Movie). Distinctly a 1970s phenomenon, as we fretted over the northward migration of killer bees and the health of our DDT-soaked bald eagles, the films usually boasted critters who turned on us bipeds after stewing too long in our toxic effluents, perhaps gaining bestial superpowers as a result. They were cheapies, by and large, although with The Swarm director Irwin Allen tried to pull off the same broad settings and large aging-star cast he’d managed in his previous disaster flicks. As a trope, humanity vs. nature works best in isolation, when solitary heroes or groups of victims are besieged in the sticks, with no outside help forthcoming.

Crimson Peak (2015)

October 14, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Jim Beaver
written by Guillermo del Toro & Matthew Robbins
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I love Guillermo del Toro. I love the ethic driving Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone and the Frankenstein and Pinocchio myths driving Mimic. I love the Prodigal Son of Blade II, the ferocity, of course, and vision of Pan’s Labyrinth, and all of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, my favourite of his films; every frame is wonder. I didn’t like Pacific Rim but I did think it was at least all-in and there’s something to be said for that. And now here’s Crimson Peak, which is just, you know, really bad and for no one. I have a friend who referred to del Toro’s book version of The Strain (I’ve never read it) as arrogant. I didn’t understand that, but it tickled during Pacific Rim and has found full flower now in Crimson Peak. There’s a point at which someone who is an expert in something can go from teacher to pedant. What begins as a conversation, nurturing and full of joy, becomes patronizing and solipsistic. I myself probably crossed over years ago. Now I have company. Del Toro at his best shares what he loves. At his worst (and Crimson Peak is del Toro at his worst, by a long shot), he believes that he’s talking over your head. You couldn’t possibly understand. You’ll never catch all his references, he says. And suddenly the party’s over and he’s all by himself in his self-aggrandizing echo chamber of curiosities.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Sensoria

October 13, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, Horror, Sweden, Thriller

**/****directed by Christian Hallman by Walter Chaw Swede Christian Hallman's first feature, Sensoria, sports a couple of nice, creepy moments but ultimately adds little to the "we have always been here" subgenre of haunted-house movies. In this iteration, Caroline (Lanna Ohlsson), freshly single and lamenting that her circle of friends consists largely of digital phantoms offering ephemeral support through social media, discovers that her new bachelorette pad is maybe haunted by the ghost of a little dead girl, My (Norah Anderson). Not helping her isolation and increasing paranoia are a pervy landlord and a dotty old lady of the kind that…

Fantastic Fest ’15: February

September 30, 2015****/****, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

****/****
starring Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, James Remar
written and directed by Oz Perkins

by Walter Chaw Osgood Perkins's hyphenate debut February is haunted. It plays like a boarding-school version of Rob Zombie's extraordinary Lords of Salem, coloured by the same sadness and sense of inevitability and doom. Like it, February features a female protagonist cast adrift in a mostly-empty building, waiting for something to take her away–to Heaven or to Hell, it's not clear. Not clear, either, if there's much of a difference at the end of the journey. Here it's Kat ("Mad Men"'s Kiernan Shipka), who has a terrible dream one night that her parents aren't going to arrive to take her home from school over the mid-winter break and then wakes to find it come true. She's marooned there with two guardians and a Heather, the beautiful Rose (Lucy Boynton), who's engineered her own abandonment, the better to spend an extra week with a boy who may have knocked her up. February is obviously about young female sexuality, locating its girl heroes right there, teetering on the cusp of still calling out to their mothers when they're hurt. And it's about grief. Grief for the passing of innocence to experience, literalized in the loss of parents and the desire for their surrogates. It wonders what would happen if Rosemary's baby were a girl, and met her real father for the first time as a young woman going through puberty. It's a lovely metaphor for the sensual horror of that transformation, for the little deaths that separate children from their parents, literally or figuratively.

TIFF ’15: Full Contact

September 27, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Croatia, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Netherlands, Thriller, TIFF

***/****
starring Grégoire Colin, Lizzie Brocheré, Slimane Dazi
written and directed by David Verbeek

by Walter Chaw Brilliant if often a bit too on-the-nose, Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek's Full Contact takes on the state of modern man by detailing America's drone war. I heard a thing on NPR a while back talking about how the traditional metric of tracking a battle group's efficiency by tallying its loss-to-kill ratio has been blown of late by drone groups that have thousands of kills to zero losses. It's an existentially frightening situation in which Nintendo skills not only predict military success, but also potentially engender the same sort of desensitization regarding the tactile obscenity of murder. The movie's title is a clue to its intentions, then: Verbeek follows drone captain Ivan (Grégoire Colin), sequestered away in a bunker somewhere in Nevada where he pilots drone aircraft, bristling with munitions, into somewhere in the Middle East, the better to assassinate tagged targets. He communicates via live messaging and a headset (the way a kid on an Xbox 360 might, essentially), and one day, though he suspects better, he hits a target that turns out to be a school. Outside, he befriends a stripper, Cindy (Lizzie Brocheré), telling her he's impotent although he's not.

TIFF ’15: Downriver

September 22, 20152015, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

**½/****written and directed by Grant Scicluna by Walter Chaw Joining Snowtown as Aussie films about sublimated desire, murder, perversion, and cults of personality, Grant Scicluna's feature debut Downriver is beautifully-lensed, patient, bleak. It reminds of another debut, Jacob Aaron Estes's 2004 Mean Creek, where, as in Downriver, the mute disinterest of Nature is used to highlight the struggle of individuals--especially children--to impose meaning on it. The title and central image of a river evoke Heraclitus's aphorism that it's impossible to ever enter the same river twice. Tied to the film's central conceit of James (Reef Ireland), a young man released…

Nomads (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

September 21, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Lesley-Anne Down, Pierce Brosnan, Anna-Maria Monticelli, Adam Ant
written and directed by John McTiernan

by Bryant Frazer Director John McTiernan’s film debut is a true ’80s oddity. Pierce Brosnan sports an ersatz French accent in his first big movie role. He’s billed opposite Lesley-Anne Down, riding the downhill slope of her post-Sphinx career, but the two have only one scene together. McTiernan’s script, to date his only screenwriting credit, is some superficial fluffernutter about restless inuat (spirits of Inuit mythology) haunting the L.A. living–except when it’s a diffuse meditation on the stateless qualities of Angelenos and California in general. Even the score, an improvisational guitar-and-synth freakout by Bill Conti and (I shit you not) Ted Nugent, is genuinely weird.

TIFF ’15: The Ones Below

September 16, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF, UK

*½/****written and directed by David Farr by Walter Chaw Another entry in the baby-in-peril subgenre of white-collar paranoia thrillers (see most recently Hungry Hearts), hyphenate David Farr's closed-room Polanski shrine The Ones Below is well-intentioned fluff that meanders around exhausted until it finally finds a place to sit. It's a literal upstairs/downstairs affair as upstairs couple Kate (Clémence Poésy) and Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore), expecting their firstborn, meet-cute their downstairs neighbours: bombshell Teresa (Laura Birn), also pregnant, and her older husband Jon (David Morrissey). A dinner party, an Inside accident, and suddenly Kate is either insane or insane like a fox…

TIFF ’15: Dheepan

September 13, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Palme d'Or Winner, Thriller, TIFF

***/****
starring Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Vincent Rottiers, Claudine Vinasithamby
screenplay by Noé Debré, Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard
directed Jacques Audiard

by Bill Chambers “Well, not exactly,” a critic acquaintance gently scoffed after I shrugged that Dheepan was “y’know, Taxi Driver.” (“So Dheepan is basically the second time Taxi Driver‘s won the Palme d’Or,” I snarked on the Twitter.) He’s a grinder, and I respect the hell out of grinders–the ones who see everything and interview everybody and indefatigably churn out coverage: They are the heavyweight champions of the film-festival circuit. But they are a literalminded bunch (they have to be, for efficiency’s sake), and the Taxi Driver parallels are admittedly by no means 1:1. In Dheepan, three refugees of a Sri Lankan military conflict form a makeshift family out of stolen identities in order to start a new life abroad. They land in France, where “Dheepan” (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) scores a job as the caretaker of an apartment complex, finds “wife” Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) work as a housekeeper for one of the building’s tenants, and enrols 9-year-old “daughter” Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) in public school. Yalini, still in the prime of her youth, bristles at having to maintain the charade, particularly the fact that she’s become an insta-mom, with Dheepan direly overestimating her maternal instincts and capacity for sentiment. Of all the women he could’ve been paired with, he got Kelly Kapoor.

Telluride ’15: Spotlight

September 10, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015, Thriller

***/****
starring Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy
directed by Tom McCarthy

by Walter Chaw Michael Keaton's a handsome guy. Not movie-star handsome in the traditional sense but, you know, not a dog. Everyday-guy handsome. Like Gene Hackman or Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino. I think fans responded the way they did when Keaton was cast in Tim Burton's Batman (i.e., violently) because Keaton doesn't look like a superhero. He has an attractively average physique. His chin is soft and that's the bit you see under the mask. But then he puts on the suit and plays the role and you understand that Keaton is who he is for the chaos of his energy. Burton used him as muse before turning to Johnny Depp, I think, because of the mania of his persona. There is no other actor the equal of Beetlejuice. He replaced Pee-Wee Herman in Burton's progression through men-children. He's doomed to eternally be smarter than the characters he plays, and more interesting. He's the boy version of Illeana Douglas. Keaton in motion is a thing of wonder and danger. He's a perfect Batman because Batman's story arc inevitably leads to the place where he's seen as the Superego to Joker's Id–as the opposite side of the same Arkham coin. Keaton is Grant Morrison's Batman. He is the average-looking Warren Beatty. If he were making movies in the '70s, he would be Robert De Niro. There aren't a lot of movie stars I like better than Michael Keaton. He is the embodiment of aspiration and stick-to-it-iveness.