“A Quiet Place” Creates Horror That is Disquieting
So many horror films are filled with noise and bombast, they don’t frighten, they irritate. “A Quiet Place” scares with its silence, making for a frightener that is utterly disquieting. The loudest sounds you will hear while watching will be your own heartbeat or breathlessness or both. Real-life married couple Emily Blunt and John Krasinski […]
Wes Anderson’s Whimsical “Isle of Dogs” Has Plenty of Bite
Wes Anderson has earned quite a reputation over the last 24 years for making films packed with whimsy, eccentricity, and gentle humor. He is a very funny filmmaker indeed, and yet if you look closer at his past eight films you will see that they are often tinged with melancholy and malice. Gene Hackman’s ne’er-do-well […]
The Modernity in “The Alienist” Made for a Timely Period Piece
Fans of Caleb Carr’s bestseller The Alienist waited 24 long years to see it finally visualized onscreen. The period thriller, published in 1994, and set in 1896, was novel in its time for being one of the first works of fiction to examine the serial killer mind, as well as blend history and fiction. At the time […]
Claire Foy plays smarter than the rest of Steven Soderbergh’s UNSANE
Sometimes the right actor can make slight horror material work like gangbusters. Think how Vincent Price so often made lesser cuts of the genre seem like prime filet. Such is the case with Claire Foy and the new horror/thriller UNSANE. She elevates the clichés in this material that moviegoers have seen a thousand times before, […]
“The Death Of Stalin” Presents Russian History Through the Lens of Farce
How absurd is our current political climate these days? So ridiculous that a porn star pay-off feels like just another day at the Oval Office? Increasingly crazy, enough so that the HBO comedy series VEEP now plays like a documentary? Risible to the point that watching cable news is almost sadomasochistic? Well, if so…boy, have […]
