thrillers
Red Rooms review - the darkest of websTuesday, 10 September 2024
A woman sits at her computer. She copy-pastes an address into a search engine. She goes to street view. She zooms in. Click. Opens a new tab. Click. Searches a name. There are no lines of green code on a black screen or indecipherable programmes... Read more... |
Trap review - how not to find a serial killer in a haystackMonday, 12 August 2024
Don’t think too hard about the narrative absurdity of Trap, the new movie wriitten and directed by M Night Shyamalan. There’s a serial killer called The Butcher on the loose in Philadelphia and though the FBI doesn’t know their quarry’s name or what... Read more... |
Sleep review - things that go bump in the nightFriday, 12 July 2024
The question Korean director Jason Yu is asking in this eerie little spine-tingler (his debut feature) is “how well do you know your partner?” He may also be inquiring whether or not you believe in life after death, while planting nagging seeds of... Read more... |
The Night Caller, Channel 5 review - all he hears is radio ga gaMonday, 08 July 2024
Showing over four consecutive nights, Night Caller is a stripped-down psychological thriller which steadily boils up to a conclusion which is both shocking and tragic.Robert Glenister turns in a meticulously controlled performance as Tony Conroy, a... Read more... |
Evil Does Not Exist review - Ryusuke Hamaguchi's nuanced follow-up to 'Drive My Car'Saturday, 06 April 2024
While Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t cast a spell as strongly as his Oscar-winning hit Drive My Car, it is a thought-provoking film well worth seeing for anyone with an interest in ecology or a penchant for... Read more... |
Mothers' Instinct review - 'Mad Women'Sunday, 31 March 2024
This is a Nineties psycho thriller in Mad Men clothes, undermining its Sixties suburban gloss and Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain’s desperate housewives with genre clichés, yet sustained by the courage of debuting director Benoît Delhomme’s un-... Read more... |
Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Phoenix Theatre review - formidable stagecraft unlocks new depths to the popular seriesFriday, 15 December 2023
Stranger Things has shown us over four seasons that the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down can be the seat of many things: terror, mystery, camaraderie, compassion. As it turns out, it can spawn great theatre, too, for Stephen Daldry’s... Read more... |
Lost in the Night review - hunting a mother's killerFriday, 24 November 2023
“Everything is legal if you have the money,” states the world-weary protagonist of this new film by the Mexican-American director Amat Escalante. And in the wilds of central Mexico, where the movie is set, the comment is unlikely to be questioned.... Read more... |
Isabelle Huppert and director Jean-Paul Salomé: 'Cinema is about a little trade, a little business'Tuesday, 11 July 2023
Isabelle Huppert is French cinema’s icon of icy transgression, from Bertrand Blier’s outrageous Les Valseuses (1974) to Paul Verhhoeven’s Elle (2017), in which her character Michéle denies rape’s trauma, instead seeking out her rapist for... Read more... |
Citadel, Prime Video review - did Amazon really pay $300m for this?Sunday, 30 April 2023
The Russo brothers, makers of Amazon Prime’s much-hyped, $300m new spy drama, decided to keep the concept simple – it’s Good versus Evil. In the Good corner we have Citadel, a super-secret global spy network which has the modest ambition of keeping... Read more... |
Filmmaker Tarik Saleh: ‘A director is at heart an immigrant’Saturday, 15 April 2023
Tarik Saleh was born between two worlds, with a Swedish mum and Egyptian dad. His Egyptian side has inspired his two highest-profile releases.Seedy, sweeping noir epic The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) followed Cairo cop Noredin (Fares Fares) as his... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Bullet TrainTuesday, 11 April 2023
Last year’s Brad Pitt vehicle Bullet Train was an affable action comedy except in those parts – including the dreadful coda – when it was an insufferably smirky one. Freighted with more thrills, intelligence, gravitas, and social commentary, 1975’s... Read more... |
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