The Woman in the Yard finds Blumhouse Productions singing a different tune compared to their back catalogue of modern horror classics. It’s a tune that’s still worth singing, but it isn’t without some unnecessary vibrato that may rub some people the wrong way. The premise starts out simple enough: a single, depressed mother, Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler of Netflix’s western The Harder They Fall) and her two kids (Peyton Jackson, Estella Kahiha), who already have a tense…
Sharp Corner is a character study of repressed, prickly ambiguity from writer/director Jason Buxton (Blackbird). The McCalls feel as though they’ve moved into the perfect house, until they discover an unfortunate wrinkle behind their rural address. Their new house looks out to a winding backroad that challenges vehicles to its turn. The drivers that succumb to the rough road turn up in the McCalls’ front yard where they’re either fatally injured or dead. This becomes…
Primarily coming from a background in television and documentary filmmaking, for his feature-length effort Last Breath, director/co-writer Alex Parkinson adapts one of his docs of the same name that chronicled this same story of a stranded and submerged saturation diver. During some underwater pipeline maintenance, a disruption leads to a snagged, and ultimately severed, oxygen supply for the diver. As his team works to save him, the diver tries to conserve the last of his…
Known as “The G” to family, anger hangs off of Ann Hunter (Dale Dickey of Leave No Trace and Hell or High Water). As the primary caregiver for her ailing husband despite feeling as though everyone perceives her as a liability, Ann doesn’t have time to sugarcoat anything through her utter exhaustion. When she and her husband are abruptly relocated from their suburban home to a care facility by their legal guardian, Ann is upset…
Cat-and-mouse thriller Pins & Needles can’t escape its flaws. Unfortunately for editor-turn-filmmaker James Villeneuve, there’s plenty of them in his feature-length debut (which had its world premiere last month at the Blood in the Snow Canadian Film Festival).
With an impressively involving story using multiple methods to scare the viewer, Hold Your Breath is just the ticket for this year’s Halloween season.
Protocol 7 answers that scenario that we’ve all played out in our head – what if a doctor made a Hollywood legal thriller? Director Andy Wakefield, a former physician and documentarian who is also an adamant anti-vaccine activist, makes his feature-length narrative debut with Protocol 7. The movie may fare better than his menacing doc, Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, but that’s also damning with faint praise.
Quaint humour and wholesome gags about retired life collide with a character-driven, Coen Brothers-inspired thriller in Thelma. In her best role since her Oscar nominated work in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, June Squibb proves her chops as a late-career lead as the titular golden-ager. Lonely albeit confidently independent in Los Angeles, Thelma isn’t seen as a liability to her daughter (Parker Posey), her son-in-law (Clark Gregg), or her grandson (Fred Hechinger). However, a phone scam that…
The Exorcism is a reminder that filmmakers have a “shot clock” when trying to map out their movies.
