The trailer for Arrival – a film not to be confused with the Charlie Sheen aliens-are-coming vehicle The Arrival (1996) – shows it to be suspenseful and action-packed. While it is the former, it is not the latter. It is something way more interesting than a generic alien invasion movie.… Read the rest
The Girl on the Train is a thriller about a small group of dyfunctional people. When one of them goes missing, the question is – wha’ happa? The problem is that the culprit and the motive are easy to guess before the movie reveals them.… Read the rest
Jason Bourne is a dumb movie about allegedly smart people. Evil dudes inside the CIA – primarily its Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) – start the hunt for former operative Bourne again, leading to various chase sequences. I saw the previous films in the franchise, but remember very little about them, and they were filed in my memory only as generic action movies.… Read the rest
Eye in the Sky is a tense thriller with a moral dilemma at its core: is it okay to sacrifice a few innocent people if you know that this decision will save a larger amount of innocents further down the line?… Read the rest
While investigating the disappearance of two colleagues, U.S. Secret Service agent Ethan Burke (Matt Dillon) gets into an accident. He regains consciousness in a town where things are not as they seem. People live according to a strange set of rules, the entire hospital is run by one creepy nurse (Melissa Leo) and the Sheriff (Terrence Howard) is a sociopath without any deputies to keep him in check.… Read the rest
10 Cloverfield Lane is a movie best seen knowing as little as possible about it beforehand. That makes it hard to review. I saw the trailer, which was very well made and misleading in a good way, but it contained shots that I had remembered and knew would be coming up at some point.… Read the rest
Gone Girl director David Fincher is no stranger to twisty tales that are heavy on the moral ambiguity. (Also see: Se7en, The Game and Fight Club.) His latest movie is two-thirds of a thriller that is successfully tense, though you are likely to figure out where the story is headed before it arrives there.… Read the rest
A mysterious dome descends over an American town, trapping the inhabitants and causing all kinds of stress and suffering. Sounds familiar? Maybe you read Under the Dome by Stephen King, or saw the tv series based on that book. Maybe you watched the Simpsons movie.… Read the rest
Orphan Black starts with a contrivance that is never fully explained. A woman happens to see someone who looks exactly like herself step in front of a train. The identical part is – of course – the main mystery, but this doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out.… Read the rest
Jamie Dornan has a very odd typecasting problem. Before he started tying up volunteers for sexual kicks in the movie Fifty Shades of Grey, he was tying up women in the television series The Fall. Only here, the women were victims rather than kinksters.… Read the rest
