Category Archives: Thriller

Alice

Alice                                      4 suns

An imaginative film that I thoroughly enjoyed was Alice. Alice (Keke Palmer) is a house slave on a southern plantation where she is owned by a cruel white man who maintains discipline through pitiless beatings. One day Alice has had all she can take and makes a run for freedom, only to find herself in modern 1973 America where she meets a kind truck driver named Frank (Common). This blending of time periods is not a case of time travel but represents a southern plantation that kept its slavey practice in place for more than 100 years. In this story Alice quickly catches on to the changes made in America transforming herself in the style of Pam Greer of the blaxploitation films of the seventies. What a cultural statement! The film is an excellent portrayal of the struggle of Black Americans against oppression across eras of American history. During the Q&A, the filmmakers talked about how there have been actual cases of people kept in slavery up to the 1960’s but they did not go into details about how this happened. It would be interesting to learn more about it.

Speak No Evil

Speak No Evil                      3 suns

Sundance always has its share of imaginative horror films so today I took in Speak No Evil. Here a young European filmmaker has conceived a story that starts with a Danish family on vacation in Italy who meet a Dutch couple that they easily make friends with. When the Dutch couple invites them to their home in the Netherlands, they quickly accept bringing their young daughter with them. Then when the hosts start to behave in some odd and eccentric ways such as disrespecting the wife’s dietary restrictions, the visitors do their best to be accepting and maintain politeness. But then as is always the case in horror movies, certain things happen, choices are made and inevitable consequences result. Things do not turn out well for our visitors. If you liked the movie Midsommar from 2019, then Speak No Evil is for you.

Emergency

Emergency         3 ½ suns

In the comedy Emergency, graduate student Kunle and his best friend, Sean are about to go on an epic journey, partying all night at the fraternity parties at their college campus. But the plans of the two young black men are interrupted when they discover an unconscious white girl on the floor of their house. The pair along with their Latino friend, Carlos realize the danger they are in if the police are alerted to their situation and must improvise to get the girl to safety without endangering their own lives. What follows is a comedy of errors as the men deal with one mishap after another. The film started as a short film from a few years ago that has now been expanded to the full length movie now showing. It is a good combination of silly comedy making a statement about the perceptions that young black men must face despite the levels of success they may reach.

892

892                                         4 suns

892 was the winner of the U.S. Dramatic Ensemble Cast Special Jury Award. It is a fairly straightforward story concerning a desperate former U.S. marine who has decided to hold employees of a bank hostage so that he can receive what is owed to him by the VA. I thought it seemed a little slow moving for a hostage taking drama. There were few action scenes and most of the film dealt with the negotiations between the marine and the police negotiator. But by the end I realized that this was a representation of an actual event which explains a lot, especially why such a subject was chosen. The acting performances were especially superb including John Boyega of Star Wars as Brian, the marine and Michael Kenneth Williams as the negotiator in what would be his final film role. This film is very unlike one from last year called Prime Time, also about a hostage situation, but was more dramatic and tension filled. Of course that one was a fictional story. 892 serves as a reminder about how our obligations to those who serve often go unfilled.

Drive-Away Dolls

Drive-Away Dolls              3 stars

If you are going to see a Coen brothers movie you know you are going to get some violent scenes often with inept crooks, some dark humor and some rather odd characters. Just think of The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading or Fargo. With this year’s Drive-Away Dolls we only have Ethan Coen directing, joined by Tricia Cooke’s writing, but we do get most of the usual elements. What we also get is a road buddy movie with a pair of lesbians on a mission to get laid, combined with plenty of dick gags. We start out in 1999 with a “Collector” (Pedro Pascal from The Last of Us and The Mandalorian) receiving a package in a briefcase but is quickly robbed and murdered by a pair of goons (Joey Slotnick and C. J. Wilson). We cut to our two heroes, Jamie (Margaret Qualley of The Nice Guys and Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan of Bad Education and Cat Person), who are both lesbians and best friends. Jamie is the adventurous one always looking for her next sexual exploit and Marian is the high strung, but intellectual one. They have a plan to do a drive away from New England to Tallahassee, Florida. This is a cheap way to travel by driving a car that the car’s owner needs delivered to another city. Hence, the title: Drive-Away Dolls. Only Jamie also plans to find all the lesbian hangouts along the way so that the repressed Marian can get laid. In Coen fashion the plan gets complicated when by accident the girls pick up a car that was intended for the pair of goons identified earlier and happens also to contain two special “packages” in the trunk. The boss of the criminal enterprise, (Colman Domingo) is none too pleased by the turn of events and tasks the goons to track the girls down and retrieve the packages. What follows then are the sexual adventures of the two women that happens to include an interlude with an all-lesbian soccer team, combined with the total ineptitude of our two goons trying to find them. (They get a little help from another lesbian friend of Jamie’s called Sukie (Beanie Feldstein of Booksmart) who also happens to be a cop. But this meeting doesn’t go well for the goons.) I must not neglect to mention that there is one additional character that appears briefly but is very pivotal to the story. And he is played by Matt Damon. (Also, this character’s penis figures prominently into the plot.) So, anyone who is a Matt Damon fan should not miss it. Overall, the movie has its moments, but it seems like a mixture of two films that don’t mesh very well. It’s good for a few laughs.

Blink Twice

Blink Twice         3 ½ stars

Actress Zoe Kravitz of Big Little Lies enters the writer/director role with her directorial debut in Blink Twice, a thriller/mystery that will really grab your attention and keep you guessing for much of the movie. The lead character, Frida (Naomie Ackie of I Wanna Dance with Somebody as Whitney Houston) should take a lesson from The Menu and Glass Onion. That is, if a billionaire tycoon invites you to his own private island, you should take a pass. I will try not to give away too many spoilers, but I will compare the movie to Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Midsommar as it involves a deadly trap for the welcome guests and to Promising Young Woman for its indictment of toxic masculinity in misogynistic white men. Frida and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development) are cocktail waitresses at a gala for a foundation put on by tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum of Magic Mike and 21 Jump Street). King says he is making amends for his past bad behavior, thus the foundation. Frida and Jess decide to crash the party as guests in evening gowns and soon Frida finds herself noticed by said billionaire and the two friends are invited to his private island for a lavish vacation with several of his rich friends. These include Vic (Christian Slater) who repeatedly takes Polaroid photos of the guests, a professional chef (Simon Rex), an actor (Haley Joel Osment in a beard), a tech wiz (Levon Hawke), a bodyguard and an assistant (Geena Davis) who seems very confused. Besides Frida and Jess, there are several other women guests who spend their time lounging at the pool, running across the immense property, having top rated meals prepared by the chef and consuming hallucinogenic drugs. Also, they are all dressed in the same white bikini outfits provided in their rooms and strangely enough, do not already know one another. (This should be a clue about their situation.) Kravitz takes her time in the early part of the movie focusing on the narcissistic behavior of the various guests inserting many humorous moments including a few well-placed pranks. (You could say that Haley Joel Osment’s character is a real dickhead.) Eventually, Frida and Jess get the sense that something is not right, and they start to realize what Slater King is really all about. I’ll leave it there for you to decide if the movie is for you. There is a warning on the screen at the start saying that there are some disturbing, graphic scenes in the movie. That is accurate as the violence and blood is comparable to that in Halloween. It becomes a revenge movie much like Promising Young Woman and Revenge. While the scenes are well put together and the characters are well acted, I couldn’t help but feel it has all been done before. We have had so many condemn the rich movies, that it is getting a bit tiresome.

Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley                                                4 ½ stars

Four years after creating the weirdly romantic film about a woman and her fish man lover, The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro brings us a gritty, lurid film based on the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham that shares the same name, Nightmare Alley. When you see the famed Mexican director’s name associated with a film, you know you are in for something unusual and disturbing. We can sense that this is a story of betrayal and doom. We first meet Stanton Carlisle, a man down on his luck in 1939 as he is burning a body inside an old house. The mysterious Stanton played by Bradley Cooper in one of his best roles to date manages to get hired at a carnival by the boss (Willem Dafoe). The carnival features a very seedy collection of freaks and sideshow performers in scenes that capture the feel of the depression. Stanton is immediately drawn to the carnival’s mentalists Zeena (Toni Collette) and Pete (David Strathairn) and finds he has a gift for reading people, eventually leaving and creating his own act, teaming up with another of the performers, Molly (Rooney Mara), whose beauty makes her stand out from the carnival freaks. As the pair perform their craft in high end clubs, Stanton encounters Lilith Ritter, a wealthy psychoanalyst whose clientele includes politicians, judges and business tycoons. Cate Blanchett plays the role expertly as her very presence commands our attention. She was born to play roles like this. Soon enough this pair devises a plan to separate the elite from their money with an elaborate scheme that is bound to lead to ruin, (though I won’t say whose). The film gets the feel of forties film noir movies that is aided by an astounding collection of gifted A list actors. Nightmare Alley was previously made into a movie in 1947 starring Tyrone Power, but I am sure del Toro did it with a much bigger budget. I am expecting it will receive a few Academy Award nominations later this week.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth               4 stars

Joel Coen does his take on Shakespeare’s play Macbeth in an unusual style. Oscar winner Denzel Washington is excellent as the power hungry Macbeth who is driven to be the king of Scotland by the combination of his wife, Lady Macbeth (Francis McDormand) and the three witches who help him hatch his murderous plan. Of special note is Kathryn Hunter who portrays the three witches in a scene where she seems not human as she contorts her body into odd shapes and utters the scheming words of all three parts. Brendan Gleeson is very appropriately cast as the loved king who is doomed to die by the hand of Macbeth. The scenery is very stark and minimal with the filming all done in black and white. It serves to bring all the viewer’s attention to the performances on the screen by the very talented actors. Some parts of the film have a fantasy like quality to show how Macbeth seems to be losing his mind as his mad plans fall apart. It has been a while since I heard the story of Macbeth, that is, when I was a senior in high school so I confess I could not follow the whole story. The movie uses the Shakespearean manner of speaking so it will be tough to get used to. If that doesn’t turn you off you would be well advised to see The Tragedy of Macbeth. I have to agree that Washington is deserving of his Oscar nomination for this role.

The Outfit

The Outfit           4 stars

Writer-director Graham Moore of The Imitation Game has created a tense well-crafted crime drama in The Outfit, starring Academy Award winner Mark Rylance as Leonard, a soft spoken tailor who operates a tailor shop in 1958 Chicago where he makes finely crafted suits. That is, a shop that is also frequented by shady gang figures who use a drop box inside to pass thick envelopes with mysterious markings and who also will have Leonard make new suits for them. Rylance is very low-key as Leonard who stays intensely focused on his craft and only wants to be able to survive the night when the mobsters become aware that there is a “rat” in their midst who is informing a rival gang of their comings and goings. The movie is unique in that the entire story takes place within the rooms of the shop, most of it in a single night filled with suspicion and murder. Two of the gangsters are played by Dylan O’Brien and Johnny Flynn who speak with convincing Chicago mobster accents. Simon Russell Beale is equally effective as the mob father figure, Roy Boyle, who wants to get to the bottom of the evening’s events, even if he has to kill someone. Zoey Deutch appears glamorous in 1950’s wardrobe as Mable, the receptionist, who is treated like a daughter by Leonard. (Deutch is the daughter of actress Lea Thompson.) The show really belongs to Rylance who gives a fascinating performance of a man who must always keep his wits about him even with a gun pointed at him. There are many lies and misleading stories being told so, the audience too must stay focused on who said what to who and who really knows the truth. I chose to see the movie based solely on seeing the trailer and am glad I made that choice.

Swallow

Swallow                               4 stars

Swallow is a difficult movie to describe. It may be a thriller turned horror movie about female empowerment in an environment controlled by men. It does concern a little known psychological disorder called pica. Hunter Conrad (Haley Bennett) is a newly married housewife whose husband is a rising star in the corporate world. Hunter is put on display in 1950’s wardrobe in a lavish, isolated house where she is expected to be the perfect wife and home decorator. The husband, Richie, is very controlling and her in-laws are judgmental toward her. The pressure only grows when it is learned that she is pregnant. It is then that the mental illness surfaces as Hunter finds satisfaction from swallowing inanimate, inedible objects and then “recovering” them. She does all this in secret trying to get greater satisfaction with more and more dangerous objects. I felt the movie gave a realistic feel for why someone would seek to cause harm to themselves when there was little they could do to control the world around them. I heard about the film when the pandemic was just starting and finally picked it as one to watch. I feel it fits in well with what we were facing in 2020 when events were controlling what we could and could not do. Haley Bennett gives an excellent performance as the housewife who is dominated by the men around her. Eventually, some additional context is offered to help explain this mental condition. There are some scenes that the squeamish may have a little trouble with, but there is no violence in the film. The film received well deserved favorable attention at film festivals before getting its brief theatrical run when Covid struck.