The Hunt is more politically charged than expected. It’s also more cartoony than expected. It’s a sardonically funny thriller that points out hypocrisies of right-wing and left-wing beliefs, and favours extravagantly violent finales over mutual understandings. Cynical, yes; but The Hunt is a really ballsy movie for strapping on a blast suit and barrelling through such edgy, non-partisan material.
By: Trevor Chartrand A plain and passable thriller, The Postcard Killings is stamped with mild mystery and timid intrigue that ultimately doesn’t deliver a whole lot of punch.
By: Jolie Featherstone If Alice in Wonderland was a tarot card, its inverse would be The Dinner Party.
By: Trevor Chartrand The debut film effort from the writer/director team Colin and James Krisel, Last Moment of Clarity is a very good try with plenty of room for improvement. The Krisel brothers attempt a Hitchcockian thriller akin to Gone Girl, involving a young man named Sam (Zach Avery) who, three years after witnessing his girlfriend’s death, discovers that she is still alive. Under threat for witnessing mob activity, the girl Sam knew as Georgia…
In The Invisible Man, the titular character – once a spooky Universal Classic Monster – receives a contemporary reimagining by writer/director Leigh Whannell.
The year is 1988. Floods of teenagers flock to a Midwestern heavy metal concert despite controversies sparked by unidentified Satanists on a murder spree and the region’s fearmongering Bible Belt. A trio of rowdy friends (Alexandra Daddario, Maddie Hasson, Amy Forsyth) have a run-in with a group of aspiring metal musicians (Keean Johnson, Logan Miller, Austin Swift). Both parties have a rocky start with each other, but the head-banging camaraderie in the air is enough…
Following in the same footsteps as Clint Eastwood’s maligned biopic The 15:17 to Paris, Tom Waller’s Cave Rescue is a dramatic thriller about the 2018 real-life mission to save a team of young Thai soccer players. Like Eastwood’s movie, it stars some of the actual people who were key players in the recovery. There isn’t much build up to the incident in Cave Rescue, which separates it from The 15:17 to Paris. Waller’s movie is…
Vivarium works as jet-black satire about the pressures of fulfilling roles that have been imposed by a seemingly unanimous understanding of tradition. It’s existentially dour, but these dissatisfied emotions from director Lorcan Finnegan and screenwriter Garret Shanley are supposed to identify how normalized expectations are not so much a failsafe plan for people, but actually a suffocating framework.
The Whistlers is a good thriller, but what’s really interesting about Corneliu Porumboiu’s movie is that it rivals similar blockbusters – even though both films are much different in scale.
Greenlight works as a thriller, but I can also see it being a cathartic outlet for student filmmakers looking to cut their teeth in an exclusive industry.