thriller
After a brief hiatus with Fast and Furious 7, mainstream horror’s prodigal son James Wan has returned to the Devil’s Church of Jump Scares with a sequel to his paranormal blockbuster, The Conjuring. The main lesson he seems to have learned on his franchise-hopping action excursion is how to make things feel absolutely massive, and in following the golden rule of sequels, he’s applied that bigger-is-better ethos to The Conjuring 2. The ghostbusting duo of the first film – Ed and Lorraine Warren – are called to London to flush out some more housebound demons, but in an effort to raise the stakes over the first film, Lorraine is also faced with her own adversaries:
Despite the title being one of the most fascinating I’ve seen in a while, Careful What You Wish For, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, is about as painfully average as a neo-noir thriller film can get. You will not be surprised or fascinated at any point in this film, where a younger man takes an older woman (Isabel Lucas) as his lover. Though, said older woman isn’t all that much older than him, sadly showing how limited roles for women are in this industry.
In Matthew Solomon’s Chatter, Agent Martin Takagi (Tohoru Masamune) comes across the intimate video chats of married couple while monitoring Internet traffic for the Department of Homeland Security. The married couple, played by Brady Smith and Sarena Khan, begin to discover that their new home is haunted. In the same vein of horror films such as Paranormal Activity and the more recent Unfriended, the mechanics within this film felt familiar.
The story of Freckles, written and directed by Denise Papas Meechan, opens with Lizzie introducing herself by voicing her strong hatred she has for the “ugly orange dots” that she refers to as her “star map to loneliness”. This is a story of a woman who has a disturbingly distorted view of herself. Despite her mother telling her that the freckles are “kisses from God”, Lizzie sees them as a curse.
If you don’t keep up, the filmography of Québécois director Xavier Dolan could expand into an intimidating mass. He released five films between 2009 and 2014 and already has two more in the pipeline, additionally serving as writer, editor, actor, and costume designer for several of the projects. That output, along with other extraneous facts, like his young age, has drawn headlines that sadly take attention away from what is an expressive filmography.
Two years after his ex-wife disappeared, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his new girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) get an invitation to a dinner party his ex-wife is throwing out of the blue. The couple is hesitant, the invitation is too elaborately fancy, and it all feels slightly off, especially after such a long time of complete silence. On their way to the party, they hit a coyote, which Will kills out of mercy.
Since they first hit cinema screens in 1984, the Coen Brothers have had a firm grip on audiences and critics alike. Renowned for their idiosyncratic, high quality work, they have found themselves increasingly in demand with studios and actors, many of whom aim to make their next project a Coen Brothers film. They have written, directed and produced all of their own pictures, edited most of them, and have recently ventured into the ‘gun for hire’ realm of screenwriting, contributing to Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, Michael Hoffman’s Gambit, and George Clooney’s upcoming Suburbicon.
The inner urge for survival is the most primitive of all impulses. For the longest time, sex was believed to be the driving force that pushes people, unconsciously and fully-cognizant, towards certain results in life. But after WWII especially, psychologists and holocaust survivors began to revisit the idea, and psychoanalysts took the obvious cue from Darwin:
Michael Thelin’s directorial feature debut is perhaps most effective in its earliest stages. When we are first introduced to a sleepy suburban neighbourhood, it is already clear that something is amiss. When we witness the kidnapping of a young woman on her way to babysit, we begin to get some idea of what is in store.
Theeb is an excellent film from this past year, and I’m afraid the precious few people will make it out to see it due to the lack of distribution. Had it not been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this year, I probably would have never come across this little gem. Theeb is set in 1916 toward the end of the Ottoman Empire, in a province known as Hijaz (around Saudi Arabia and Medina) where two brothers, who hail from a family nomads, escort a British soldier with a mysterious wooden box to the Ottomon railway.
A remake of the 1969 Italian-French film La Piscine and partly inspired by David Hockney’s ‘Swimming Pool’ painting, A Bigger Splash is the fourth feature film from Luca Guadagnino, and has already made significant waves with critics and audiences alike (sorry for the absolutely appropriate pun). Starring Tilda Swinton as rockstar Marianne recovering from throat surgery, and Matthias Schoenaerts as her ever-loving albeit boring boyfriend Paul, the two of them aim to escape life to an idyllic Italian island in the middle of the Mediterranean. No phones, no work, no interruptions.
Even though he hails from a nation renowned for its take on exploitation cinema, director John Hillcoat has repeatedly proven himself to be far more interested with the archetypes of American genre films. His international breakthrough feature, 2006’s The Proposition, was the perfect marriage of the sensibilities of Ozploitation and the most hard-boiled Westerns; for a country with no major cinema heritage, it suggested Hillcoat was a director who could put his nation firmly on the world cinema map. Instead of continuing this distinctive subversion of genre with his subsequent films, Hillcoat has become increasingly formulaic.
Sometimes watching a movie can feel like a duty. Maybe that’s because I take movies too seriously sometimes (okay, maybe all the time). But explaining why a movie fails is fraught with questions about my own expectations of a movie as they relate to the quagmire of unknowns about the creators’ intentions, let alone the practical budgetary constraints and other contingent aspects of an independent or studio production.
Concussion does to the sports film what I was sincerely hoping it would avoid: it dramatizes its subject in such an unbelievable way that it becomes nothing more than mindless propaganda. Dealing with the true subject of brain injuries within retired NFL players, the film simply floats from one cliché to the next, which left me feeling almost dazed after it had finished.
Frank Sinatra, whose 100th birthday would have been this December, was one of the great entertainers of the 20th century. He had an exceptional voice that made him perhaps the most influential vocalist in history, but Sinatra doesn’t sing a note in his best movie, the Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962). This deft political drama, which wouldn’t have been made without Sinatra’s intervention, uncannily predicts many of the tumultuous events of the 1960s and beyond.