The horror genre relies, to an extent, on the utilization of familiar tropes. The use of these tropes can reward and subvert expectations, and how these tropes are used contributes to the film’s effectiveness. Audience familiarity is both an opportunity and a difficulty for filmmakers: Give the audience what they want and they welcome it,…
As an adult in her 30’s, hearing tales of mythical creatures such as unicorns, Santa Clause, or RuPaul seem entirely plausible. There’s still some sparkle left in the sun, so they must (like talking M&M’s) exist. Yet I find it hard to believe that we live in a world that still makes movies like The…
“Be me, then be yourself,” so says Chuck Knoach (Ben Lloyd-Hughes, “Me Before You”), a best-selling self-help guru who has an avid fan in Lou (Katy Brayben, “Luther” TV series) a 30-something woman with a dead-end job and a suffocating mother (Sarah Ball, “Doctors” TV series) for a housemate. As we see her enjoying rare…
The whodunnit provides a certain kind of cinematic pleasure. The crime which is never straightforward. The host of suspects, all with motives and sometimes conflicting alibis. The elaborately twisting plot where half the fun is not knowing and the other half finding out. Through the decades and across media from literature to film to television…
After a long and difficult road for Martin Scorsese’s crime epic memoir, all the ingredients are present for a masterful piece of cinema. The talent includes eight Oscar winners: Director Scorsese, screenwriter Steven Zaillian, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, costume designer Sandy Powell, as well as four Oscar-winning performers — Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci…
Nicolas Cage (“211”) generally uses a couple of different gears of crazed for his movies nowadays, one a sort of wild-eyed screaming banshee and the other not so much. In Grand Isle, he dials it back ever so slightly to give us the kind of unhinged lunatic that most audiences (me included) find entertaining. To…
In the opening minutes of The Kill Team, we see brief glimpses of optimism, national pride, and infantry brotherhood from our titular platoon of soldiers — all of which ends up shattered well before the ten-minute mark as the horrors of wartime and their effect on those involved make themselves abruptly known. Nat Wolff (“Home…
