Radha Mitchell stars as a retired Special Forces sniper living in the remote Australian countryside with her rebellious teenage daughter (Annabel Wolfe). The serenity of their isolated life is interrupted when an agent of an old enemy locates the former sniper and alerts his boss, a mad warlord (Tim Roth), to their location. The result is a solid, although not overly ambitious, thriller.
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Nearly a decade before she was Nikita, Maggie Q was basically Nikita. Siu-Tung Ching‘s 2002 thriller stars Maggie Q, Anya Wu, and Jewel Lee as the three survivors from dozens of young girls abducted over the world, trained to be assassins, and pitted against each other by the elusive Madam M (Almen Wong). The movie offers flashbacks to the the girls’ training and graduation while in the present our protagonists are offered one last job to earn their freedom only to fall into a trap laid by a Yakuza boss (Andrew Lien) out for revenge against the women for one of their previous missions.
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The 1972 Spanish-Italian horror-thriller traps a group of travelers in a mansion so far off the beaten path that the locals are unaware of its existence. Director Francisco Lara Polop‘s hit-and-miss story offers a bit of a convoluted setup, and some well-timed mysterious fog, to get a drifter (Andrés Resino), a hitchhiker (Lisa Leonardi), a prick (Franco Fantasia), an heiress (Analía Gadé), and a lawyer (Eduardo Fajardo) and his wife (Yelena Samarina) all to this lonely, although well-kept, mansion owned by a woman who may, or may not, be a vampire (Ida Galli).
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The 1977 giallo film, an Italian subgenre featuring both murder mystery as well as slasher and thriller elements, offers up 9 rather unlikable members of a dysfunctional rich family who start being killed off one by one when they gather at their family villa on a private island far removed from the prying eyes of the rest of the world. The family of the authoritative Ubaldo (Arthur Kennedy) include his disturbed sister Elisabetta (Dana Ghia), his second wife Giulia (Caroline Laurence), and his children Lorenzo (John Richardson), Michele (Massimo Foschi), and Patrizia (Loretta Persichetti) and their their mix of oversexed or frigid spouses Greta (Rita Silva), Carla (Flavia Fabiani), and Walter (Venantino Venantini).
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Nine Guests for a Crime Read More »
I’ll give Kate Mara credit for taking unusual projects. However, when they don’t work they really don’t work. The Astronaut starts out as a psychological thriller with Mara cast as our astronaut recently returned from space and suffering “common” side effects while kept in seclusion in a secure facility off the grid (which at least makes for an interesting setting as events devolve). Mentioning several times what our astronaut is experiencing is normal, the film continues to push and prod Mara’s character to question her reality and her sanity.
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