I’m not totally sure if A Vigilante — the feature debut from writer-director Sarah Daggar-Nickson — is meant to be soaked up as entertainment so much as a reconciliation between movies-as-art and movies-as-therapy. The small-scale story is interested in a single dominating issue, that of domestic violence, though in ways that feels inconsistently intentioned, despite…
A middle-aged man (Surapol Poonpiriya) picks up a teenage girl (Prapamonton Eiamchan) from school. The way he’s smiling at her, you’d think he’s her adoring father. Suddenly he punches her for swearing and expects her to give him a handjob. He drives her to his shabby “love hotel,” Motel Mistress. Tot Niyom (Wissanu Likitsathaporn) is…
This blood-is-thicker-than-water melodrama, A Violent Separation, presents itself as a study in the ties that bind, a familial tale that is unfortunately all too familiar. In it, a cop brother named Norman (Brenton Thwaites, “Gods of Egypt”) helps his shadier brother named Ray (Ben Robson, “The Boy”) out of a particularly horrible jam, with each…
Dennis Quaid’s perverse Peeping Tom is the central psycho in director Deon Taylor’s home invasion hokum, The Intruder. Formulaic and faceless, Taylor’s (“Traffik”) domestic drama merely echoes the familiar foundations of other generic goosebump-instilling thrillers chronicling the exploits of a stalking menace out to majorly inconvenience the tranquility of a passionate married couple. From yesteryear’s…
“You think I am waiting to die . . . But I am waiting to be found” — Samantha Reynolds In a mission from which they have little chance of returning, a group of condemned prisoners elect to undertake a voyage to the deepest regions of outer space to attempt to harness the energy of…
Sure the Clown Prince of Crime got his accolades in “The Dark Knight,” but now with Joker it seems he’s finally gotten a film all to himself that he’s been deserving of. And it sure has a dark, dark Bernhard Goetz tone to it. Turns out Batman’s archnemesis was just an “ordinary” guy, living with…
Fans of Jordan Peele’s incomparable societal critique “Get Out” can rejoice as the horror-auteur swings for the fences in his newest horror-thriller Us, and for the most part, hits it straight out of the park. Piggybacking off of the inquisitive, yet cynical, tone of his directorial debut, Us follows the Wilson family as they attempt…
