thriller
With the blockbuster success of Fifty Shades of Grey in cinemas worldwide, many pundits are claiming that this marks a new era for “sex positive” movies – and much more importantly, the basic idea of a woman being as sexually open as her male counterparts not being a source of cinematic shame, but one of pride. It has only been two decades since what I dub the “unofficial Michael Douglas misogyny trilogy” of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure hit cinemas, films that (like Fifty Shades) were successful due to their frankness of sexuality. Yet those movies were inherently misogynist in suggesting that women were mentally unstable, or just plain evil for daring to be as open about their sexuality as men.
2014 should really be known as “The Year of the Biopic.” There have been films this past year that were based on many world-reknown icons, from Martin Luther King to Stephen Hawking to pop singer James Brown. And somewhere in the midst of all those comes the story of Alan Turing, a British mathematician that almost single-handedly won World War II.
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of The Babadook”. The mainstream horror genre is in a bad state at the moment. In the wake of the success of Paranormal Activity, Hollywood studios are taking advantage of the huge financial potential of the genre, and the fact that you can spend very little money on a horror film and make a huge profit off of teenage audiences.
A trio of rambunctious adolescents storm into a man’s house, steal his car, and then, just for the hell of it, beat his dog to death. Unbeknownst to them, the man they robbed is none other than John Wick, a former assassin who was so good at his job that he earned a nickname of “The Boogeyman.” Let’s just say that they pissed off the wrong guy.
If the media blitz preceding its release is anything to go by, Gone Girl is being pitched as brooding, twisty, and somewhat orthodox whodunnit. If you buy a ticket expecting just that, you won’t be disappointed. David Fincher’s film, based on Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name, has all the shifty intricacies you’d hope for in a thriller.
According to my personal checklist, the extent to which a film can affect a viewer is a mark of its quality. Pioneer must have done something right, because it absolutely wrecked my sense of calm. A full 24 hours after watching director Erik Skjoldbjærg’s thriller for the first time, I still find myself feeling strangely uneasy – stealing glances over my shoulder, eyeing my friends and family with icy distrust…I even threw out a plate of unattended food on the off chance it had been poisoned by the shady agents of a deep-sea drilling conglomerate.
In this animated short film called Francis, a young man tells us about his memories of a camping trip. As he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, he’d often go camping in the Quetico Provincial Park, up on the border of Minnesota and Canada. However, he won’t be going back there any time soon, not after what happened there to Francis Brandywine.
Last year, Denis Villeneuve directed one of the most pleasant surprises of the year with Prisoners, an unrelentingly tense film about child abduction that presented intriguing moral questions while also providing satisfying twists and turns throughout. That filmed starred Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal has teamed up with Villeneuve again in Enemy, a much smaller and much, much more mind-bending film than Prisoners.
Alfred Hitchc*ck. The name alone makes me shiver. Known for his concoctions of seriously haunting imagery and bone-chilling scores, Hitchc*ck films are acclaimed as some of the best thrillers of all time.
In The Purge, a happy, wealthy family gets ready for the annual night of the Purge, a 12-hour period during which all crime is legal. This new way to fight crime has been very successful – crime is at an all time low, as is unemployment. Moreover, it is supposedly an easy way to rid society of those who do not contribute.
The director of Training Day (2001) (a respectable movie to say the least) has made the most hilariously ridiculous, cringe-inducingly bad movie I’ve seen in some time. Boasting a cast of renowned actors like Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Basset, even this ensemble could not save it. Olympus Has Fallen opens on Christmas eve, showing a happy president, a happy first lady, a really happy kid, happy bodyguards – until something awful happens (of course).
Side Effects is a movie about the business of psychiatric medications, fraud, insanity and the failure of the criminal justice system. It’s a complex movie with many plots and twists, and is captivating from start to end. From a very creepy, melancholic opening, we are taken three months earlier into the story.