Split (2017)
DIRECTOR: M. Night Shyamalan
CAST: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula, Betty Buckley
REVIEW:
While it might be his first commercially successful movie in years, I have to go against the critical consensus and disagree that Split represents a return to form for M. Night Shyamalan. I’ve never held the writer-director in that exalted esteem, but The Sixth Sense, Signs, and The Village were enjoyable, if flawed (the twist in The Sixth Sense, while a great “gotcha” surprise in the moment, makes less sense the more you think back on it), and in some ways Split embodies his troubled career: a movie with flashes of promise that goes off the rails, sputtering along in fits and starts until finally undone with a twist (such as it is) that turns the movie from a psychological thriller into something like a comic book supervillain origin story that doesn’t come to any true ending (due to Shyamalan’s intention to tie it in with 2000’s Unbreakable and set-up a third installment in what he is now calling a “trilogy”). Whether Shyamalan’s franchise intentions come to pass remains to be seen (though Split‘s success at the box office might be enough to get the green light), but taken on its own, Split is as schizophrenic and half-formed as its villain’s identity. Continue reading
Red Dragon (2002)
DIRECTOR: Brett Ratner
CAST:
Edward Norton, Anthony Hopkins, Ralph Fiennes, Emily Watson, Mary-Louise Parker, Harvey Keitel, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anthony Heald, Bill Duke
REVIEW:
Following in the footsteps of 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs and 2001’s Hannibal, 2002’s Red Dragon was purported to complete the Hannibal Lecter ‘trilogy’ (but then came the ill-conceived flop Hannibal Rising, detailing Hannibal’s childhood and thus removing the last shred of the character’s enigma- and whose bright idea was it to try to make a Hannibal Lecter movie without Anthony Hopkins?). Actually, Red Dragon is a remake of 1986’s Manhunter, which was itself an adaptation of author Thomas Harris’ book Red Dragon, the first to feature the character of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, meaning although it was the last made, Red Dragon is chronologically the first in the series.
Insomnia (2002)
DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan
CAST: Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Martin Donovan, Maura Tierney, Jonathan Jackson
REVIEW:
WARNING: THIS REVIEW WILL REVEAL ASPECTS OF THE PLOT
In hindsight, after such impressive entries on Christopher Nolan’s filmography as The Dark Knight, The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar, Insomnia feels low-key and even slight, lacking the grandiose ambition the British director would later become known for. Ranked alongside his later efforts (Insomnia was only his third film after little-seen indie Following and the critically acclaimed mind-bender Memento), it’s one of his least memorable films, but a “lesser” Christopher Nolan film is still a taut and intriguing murder mystery/psychological thriller worth viewing. Continue reading
Guilty as Sin (1993)
DIRECTOR: Sidney Lumet
CAST: Rebecca De Mornay, Don Johnson, Jack Warden, Stephen Lang
REVIEW:
Guilty as Sin is a slickly, if somewhat shallowly, entertaining courtroom/psychological drama/thriller that serves up plot complications like clockwork, all in moderately engrossing if not particularly surprising or electrifying. It’s not a great courtroom or thriller classic, but it’s an adequate diversion for 107 minutes.
Continue readingThe Silence of the Lambs (1991)
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Demme
CAST:
Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine, Anthony Heald, Diane Baker, Brooke Smith, Chris Isaak, Charles Napier, Daniel von Bargen
REVIEW:
Few cinematic villains are a source of as much morbid fascination as Hannibal Lecter. Like the heroine Clarice Starling, we are frightened and disturbed by him, and yet we are too intrigued to turn our eyes away. Dr. Lecter is undoubtebly the character best-remembered from the psychological thriller The Silence of the Lambs, and the acclaim showered on Anthony Hopkins for his Oscar-winning performance sometimes threatens to overshadow Jodie Foster’s also Oscar-winning lead role as FBI trainee Clarice Starling, a fine performance and a well-developed character in her own right. Clarice and Hannibal are two of the strongest characters ever written and acted in a horror movie, and they are given a script that does them justice, a dark, intelligent thriller that relies much less on blood and guts than on well-honed characterizations, a few scenes of indelible purely verbal interactions, and a vivid sense of atmosphere. All of these elements combined to make The Silence of the Lambs a classic of the thriller genre and earned it five Academy Awards in 1991. Continue reading
Misery (1990)
DIRECTOR: Rob Reiner
CAST: James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen, Lauren Bacall
REVIEW:
Following 1986’s Stand By Me, Rob Reiner has now chosen to bring another one of Stephen King’s stories to the screen, this time Misery, an adaptation of King’s same-named 1987 novel. Misery delves further into the horror genre—well-traversed territory for King—than the coming-of-age story Stand By Me but avoids any supernatural elements. The horror here is of the comparatively banal variety but one suspects may be a fear sprung from Stephen King’s own imagination: the obsessed fan.
Continue readingPeeping Tom (1960)
DIRECTOR: Michael Powell
CAST: Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Moira Shearer
REVIEW:
Coming out only months before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom narrowly beat it out for staking a claim to fame as the original founder of the slasher movie genre (although by modern standards, or even the standards of the likes of Halloween or Friday the 13th in the next decade, there’s precious little “slashing”). One has to remember the year of its release; for a movie that feels exceedingly tame in its usually implied violence today, it was shocking and controversial at the time. It’s also strange to consider that Psycho, which premiered only months later and had even more depraved subject matter, was a huge hit and acclaimed, while Peeping Tom was a notorious flop that was pulled from theaters, virtually ended its director’s career, and was savaged by the British press. Critics seemed to be in a competition for the most hyperbolic and pearl-clutching condemnations. Derek Hill, reviewer of Tribune magazine, stated colorfully that “the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Len Mosley, writing for the Daily Express, stated even more hyperbolically that the film was “more nauseating and depressing than the leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay, and the gutters of Calcutta”. Such was the scorn leveled at the film that star Carl Boehm later recalled that no one at the premiere wanted to shake his or his director Powell’s hand. However, in following decades the film eventually earned a more favorable critical reappraisal as an ahead-of-its-time psychological horror thriller and gained prominent admirers like Martin Scorsese, who praised the film in writings and even chipped in $5,000 to help the relatively obscure and forgotten film find a wider audience with a 1978 re-release.
Continue reading