Category Archives: Thriller

Operation Finale

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Operation Finale                               3 ½ stars

Operation Finale is the newly released film by director Chris Weitz that tells the true story of the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of the final solution by Nazi Germany, the killing of the Jewish population in Europe during World War II.  Eichmann had fled to Argentina after the war along with many other German Nazis where he started a new life with a new Spanish name and family.  The agents of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency have been tirelessly hunting down these former Nazis since the war and in 1960 believe they may have located the long sought after Eichmann in Buenos Aires.  Eichmann, masterfully portrayed by Ben Kingsley maintains that eternal defense that he was merely “following orders” and was but “a cog in a machine”.  Oscar Isaac is Malkin, one of the agents of Mossad who manages to connect with the captured Eichmann in the many conversations with him as the agents are awaiting their opportunity to smuggle him out of the country back to Israel where he is to stand trial.  Isaac does his usual creditable acting performance as the Israeli agent.  Most of the movie focusses on the time that the Israelis have Eichmann in captivity where they attempt to get him to confess his role in the killing of the Jews.  Only in the first part of the movie do we see how the agents find and suspect they may have found the elusive Eichmann.  This part of the film seems unconvincing to me as they seem to have only the thinnest of evidence that they have found the right man.  (Early in the film we see Malkin involved in the killing of a man mistakenly thought to be Eichmann.)  Also, there are flashbacks to scenes of mass killings during the war that are shown as memories of what happened that may or may not be accurate.  What is interesting is Kingsley’s portrayal of the way Eichmann goes from admitting little of his involvement to outright pride of what he accomplished in the face of his captors.  By the end of the film there is no doubt that the agents have found a true psychopath who embodies the phrase “the banality of evil”.  Director Chris Weitz has had a hit and miss career as director, giving us hits About a Boy and A Better Life, while also delivering disappointments like The Golden Compass and the Twilight Saga: New Moon.  Operation Finale was good but not the greatest of his work.

Searching

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Searching                            4 stars

One of the most original movies to come along lately is Searching which is in theaters now.  It stars John Cho as a widowed father whose teenage daughter has mysteriously gone missing and it is up to him and one police detective to find out what happened to her.  The hunt leads him into the world of his daughter’s social media stored on her computer where he finds out he did not know his daughter very well.  The original aspect is that the movie is told entirely on the screens of computers, smart phones and cameras.  We never see any of the characters in the normal way seen in most movies.  Though there have been many films centered around phones and social media, Searching takes it a step further and does an admirable job of it.  The method of presentation is also aided by having an interesting story that slowly unfolds in front of us as well as some excellent acting from John Cho and Debra Messing who plays the police detective.  I hope it’s not giving anything away if I say things are not what they appear in this movie.  This is a first effort by Screenwriter and Director Aneesh Chaganty.  This 25 year old quit his job in order to make this movie after making commercials for Google.  It looks like he has a promising career ahead of him.

Verity

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Verity    1 ½ stars

Verity is Latin for the word truth. It is also the title of the new psychological thriller by Michael Showalter (The Idea of You, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) based on the novel by Colleen Hoover. Truth can come in many forms, it may not be shared by different people, and it may be very hard to find. This is especially true in Verity. The movie stars Dakota Johnson as Lowen Ashleigh, a published yet not very successful fiction writer, Anne Hathaway (who is in about half of the new movies this year) as Verity Crawford, a highly successful writer of fiction and Josh Hartnett as Verity’s husband, Jeremy. Now, do you remember my advice of what to do if a billionaire invites you to their private mansion/island/compound? Apparently, the same applies if a famous writer invites you to their secluded house in the woods. At the outset of the movie, Lowen is walking to a meeting with a publisher when she happens to meet Jeremy at a street corner where she witnesses a bicyclist get killed by a passing car and she ends up covered in the cyclist’s blood. (What a way to introduce a character.) Sympathetic Jeremy helps her get cleaned up and lends her his shirt so she can still make it to her meeting. (Never mind how traumatized she must be.) When she asks him about his reaction to the tragedy, his response is “I’ve seen worse”. Who says that? But then, Jeremy shows up at her meeting as the one making the offer to Lowen for her to be a ghost writer for his wife, Verity to continue writing her wildly successful book series. After some convincing from her agent (Ismael Cruz Cordova), Lowen accepts, but first she must move into the couple’s isolated luxury home so she can research Verity’s materials on her books. Upon arrival she meets their son, Crew, who is about five and finds out that Verity is paralyzed and in a comatose state, requiring round-the-clock care. Lowen is told that this is the result of a recent car accident. (The creepiness expands.) Lowen continues with her mission, delving into Levity’s notes and books that show that Levity writes about some very dark stuff, always from the point of view of the villain. Things take a long time to get going, but eventually we find out that these are some really fucked up people that have an extremely twisted view of things. (One thing though, with this group of actors there is no shortage of steamy sex.) Without giving too much away, Lowen is drawn into a world of deceit that will consume her. The audience too, will become uncertain of what to believe as each layer of complexity is revealed. The more I thought about what I saw, the less I liked it. The actions of the characters are so convoluted and absurd you will leave thinking that no one could think like that. By the final reveal, I was thinking why did I come see this movie. The critics mostly panned it, but it was a box office success. The author, Colleen Hoover has had three other books made into movies: “It Ends with Us”, “Regretting You” and “Reminders of Him”. I have not seen any of them. The movies are described as dull by critics but have made billions of dollars. Now I know that I don’t need to see any of them.

Peppermint

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Peppermint                        1 star

In what has to be one of the worst movies of the year, Peppermint from director Pierre Morel puts Jennifer Garner on the screen as a vigilante mom who is out for revenge against the drug cartel that killed her husband and daughter.  There is nothing original in this poorly written action thriller as we go from one predictable scene to another.  The premise is that ordinary housewife, Riley North (Garner) disappears for five years as she trains to become a one woman killing machine to hunt down those responsible for killing her family including those in the criminal justice system who failed to convict the killers that she personally identified.  There is little background on how she achieved this.  There is no mentor, no account of the training that she went through.  She just appears one day when the killing starts and she is regarded as a hero on the local social media.  Law enforcement and the FBI are stymied in their efforts to find her.  All of the characters seem very stereotypical and one dimensional including the gang members who are all Hispanic and the police and prosecutors.  When Riley appears at the gang’s hideout it seems that she cannot miss, killing a gang member with every shot.  Such predictability just lead to the movie being boring.  Please do not go to see Peppermint.  It is automatically a candidate for worst movie of the year.

A Simple Favor

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A Simple Favor                  4 ½ stars

A Simple Favor starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively seems to be a movie that is many things.  It starts as a buddy comedy movie, turns into a mystery suspense and then into a thriller.  All this is done in a good entertaining way that keeps our interest throughout as the plot brings a few unexpected twists our way.  It brings together the two talented actresses Anna Kendrick (without her Pitch Perfect singing) and Blake Lively (my favorite shark fighter girl from The Shallows) as best friends until one of them suddenly disappears without explanation leaving the other to solve the mystery of what happened together with the missing woman’s husband (Henry Golding).  The comedic Kendrick and well-paced plot is further aided by the most interesting choice of French pop music as a background that I have heard in quite a while.  Just be sure you don’t step out and miss any of the surprises along the way.  It can be a challenge to keep up with at times.

Assassination Nation

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Assassination Nation      3 ½ stars

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this film, but I did expect a great deal of violence which Assassination Nation did deliver on.  This drama by Sam Levinson follows four high school teenage girls who engage in social media like all other teenagers and do things their parents would not approve of.  Then we find out there is a hacker who is releasing secrets of an assortment of local officials and ruining their careers stirring up anger of the local citizens.  This pattern continues until the town essentially loses its mind resulting in horrendous violence being leveled at our teenage subjects.  This film takes on many current issues like misogyny, hypocrisy and the loss of privacy doing so with a vicious approach.  I think it is showing us what it would be like if we took the anger expressed on social media and applied it to meeting people in person on the streets.  This is not a pleasant prospect.  I typically don’t go for extremely violent movies, but give them a chance if there is more to them than just the violence.  This one has a message that fits well with the anger being expressed in our society today.  It seems to be asking us to have some understanding for one another before we all kill each other.

The Post

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The Post              5 stars

In my quest to see all Oscar nominated movies of last year I watched The Post, the Spielberg directed thriller drama about the Washington Post struggle to stay relevant in 1971 by reporting on the secrets revealed in the Pentagon Papers.  In this true story, the first woman major newspaper publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep) and the Post’s editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) must make the critical decisions about whether to publish the government secrets about the failures of the Vietnam War, risking the very future of the newspaper business.  This film was put together in near record time as the producers including Steven Spielberg wanted to make a movie that was very relevant to the relationship between Washington and the press of today.  The film pays great attention to detail and gets the feel of the newspaper business of the early seventies.  The newsrooms and printing press equipment are very authentic down to the metal desks and loud typewriters.  The drama brought to us by the acting skills of Streep and Hanks as well as the excellent supporting cast is compelling and will keep your attention throughout the movie’s run time.  The movie was written based on the memoirs of Graham, Bradlee and Daniel Ellsberg, thus it is very close to a representation of the true story.  It’s hard to imagine putting together a team of filmmakers more talented this this crew.  The Post may not have won best picture last year but it had to be in the running.  One interesting piece of trivia about the movie is that it took only nine months from putting the screenplay together until completion of the editing, which is close to a miracle in Hollywood.

Bad Times at the El Royale

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Bad Times at the El Royale           4 ½ stars

From the man who wrote The Martian and World War Z comes one of the most fun movies I have seen in a while.  Bad Times at the El Royale brings seven strangers together at a rundown hotel on the border of California and Nevada for a fateful night when someone is bound to die.  This movie is full of surprises with several turns that makes you wonder what is coming next.  Plus it has one amazing cast bringing together the talents of Jeff Bridges, Jon Hamm, Chris Hemsworth, Dakota Johnson and a relative newcomer Cynthia Erivo.  It starts with the near simultaneous arrival of four guests at the previously mentioned El Royale hotel, a place that was once a great attraction for celebrities and stars but is now rundown and has lost its appeal.  But there is something very sinister about the place, something that our guests will discover very soon.  The story is told in a nonlinear fashion as it slowly reveals secrets of each of our unfortunate characters until the shocking scene that will determine everyone’s fate.  The best scenes have to be those shared by Bridges and Erivo as they go from acquaintances to enemies to trusted allies.  This is one movie lovers need to see and I am surprised to see it hasn’t gotten more attention.  I hope we will hear more from writer director Drew Goddard in the future.

Buddy

Buddy   4 stars

Do you have fond memories of those children’s TV shows from the eighties and nineties of adult size colorful characters and children singing happy tunes about learning, getting along with others and doing chores? Or maybe your memories are not so pleasant? Such shows are the basis of Casper Kelly’s Buddy, a horror movie that features a children’s TV show from the nineties that stars a full-size bright orange unicorn set in a colorful house and yard together with several children and a few other adult characters. This movie was featured at The Sundance Film Festival this year, but I had not seen it until it opened in theaters. As the film opens the kids and Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key of Wonka and Only Murders in the Building) are having a good time singing “You Love Buddy, yes you do.” But later when one of the kids refuses to obey Buddy’s orders, a violent encounter occurs off camera and the child is mysteriously absent later. (The other kids are told that he was called to go to Diamond City.) Things escalate with each new episode as Buddy violently kills off another character or child in stark fashion when things don’t go his way, until the remaining children run away into the woods toward Diamond City in scenes reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz. I cannot express how impressed I was with the acting of the children as they displayed artificial happiness switching to suspicion and fear. Later, the setting changes to a family at home in the present. The parents are Grace (Cristin Milioti of How I Met Your Mother) and Ben (Topher Grace of That 70’s Show and Spider-Man 3) who have two boys in a seemingly normal home life. Only Grace has a very uneasy feeling about the situation, expressing to Ben that she believes that they had a third child that they had forgotten. Later, the strange Buddy TV show appears on their TV screen, and Grace is pulled into the TV and added to the cast of the show. Thus, we become aware that Buddy is snatching kids from their homes to be on the show with their memories and those of their families of their past lives being erased. Without giving too much away, the confrontation between humans and orange, plushy control freak escalates to an all-out bloody battle where only one side will survive. Other voice actors include Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water), Patton Oswalt (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty), Eric Bauza (Coyote vs. Acme) and Devon Hawkes Ludlow, noted puppeteer. I knew this was going to be a weird one when I went in. Despite the dark premise, I was impressed by the well-constructed story it told and its lesson about trusting your instincts. Although it has bloody scenes, the violence is obviously fake and meant to amuse. It would be appropriate for tweens and older kids and silly horror loving adults to see the movie, but I advise against taking smaller children. While watching it I couldn’t help but think of how fun it must have been for the child actors to be in such an odd horror movie. Other comedy horror movies I have seen of this genre are Krazy House where a sitcom about a suburban family is invaded by violent Russian gangsters and Little Monsters where a young man and a kindergarten teacher must defend a kindergarten class on a field trip from marauding zombies. All of these were available at Sundance.

First Reformed

First Reformed                  4 stars

First Reformed has been described as a comeback for writer director Paul Schrader, who is known for writing Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ.  He has not produced any real notable films of late until First Reformed showed up earlier this year.  The film tells a dark story of Rev. Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), an ill, alcoholic pastor of a small declining, but historic church who is facing a crisis of faith.  Toller is asked to counsel a troubled young man by the man’s wife (Amanda Seyfried) who happens to be pregnant with their first child.  The husband is an active environmentalist and is very troubled by the amount of pollution that the planet is seeing.  He may even be teetering on the edge of self destruction. Things take a dramatic turn for the worse and Toller sinks ever deeper into depression and his drinking.  This is all going on at the same time that a 250th anniversary of the church is being planned for the church which is subsidized by a nearby megachurch led by Rev. Jeffers (the comedian Cedric Kyles, aka Cedric the Entertainer).  These events serve as devices that drive the film to a very startling and intense conclusion.  The film has a very stark and slow moving style that is unlike most films from Hollywood.  One can see that the director’s religious background has a lot to do with the message being told.  Be forewarned.  Some parts of the film are disturbing, but it is certainly worth seeing if only as a means of discussing one’s own faith.  First Reformed is also greatly aided by the strong performances of all of its main stars, especially Ethan Hawke.  This is likely one of his best performances to date.