Thriller

A Call to Spy

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  • Title: A Call to Spy
  • IMDb: link

A Call to Spy movie reviewSet during WWII, Stana Katic stars as Vera Atkins charged with finding and recruiting women to be spies for the Special Operations Executive in order to obtain vital information in Nazi-controlled Europe. Trained in sabotage and subversion, the SOE’s agents are sent in to build spy networks and relay information back about the enemy.

Based on true events, A Call to Spy focuses on two of Vera’s recruits Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas), who would become known to the Germans as “the most dangerous of all Allied spies,” and Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte) who became the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France.

A Call to Spy is an old school spy thriller about normal people standing up to do the extraordinary when called upon to serve a country that doesn’t value them as much as it should. Director Lydia Dean Pilcher and screenwriter Sarah Megan Thomas not only shed light on the women’s accomplishments but also highlight the sexism and racism they fought both abroad and at home by those questioning their loyalty and usefulness as part of the war effort.

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The Lie

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  • Title: The Lie
  • IMDb: link

The Lie movie posterThe Lie is a joyless exercise featuring Peter Sarsgaard and Mireille Enos as a pair of divorced parents who decide to to work together to hide the fact that their daughter (Joey King) is responsible for the death of one of her friends (Devery Jacobs) during a contrived set-up in the film’s tiresome first act.

The film features the parents making a series of bad decisions, including trying to throw suspicion on the missing girl’s father (Cas Anvar) as the reason for her disappearance by painting him as a child abuser while forcing their daughter to echo the lies to the police. Sarsgaard and Enos do what they can, but there’s not much here to work with, while King is stuck with a character the script can never properly come to terms with. Melodramatic as a tween with her first phone, events spiral out of control and even an absurd late twist can’t save what is best forgotten.

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Unhinged

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Unhinged
  • IMDb: link

Unhinged movie reviewWhile far less clever than Falling Down, the new thriller from director Derrick Borte and screenwriter Carl Ellsworth plays on some of the same themes with a protagonist completely out of control. The difference here is that “The Man” (Russell Crowe), as he’s credited, is never internally explored. The perspective of the film is shown through the eyes of his victims as he targets friends and family of a woman (Caren Pistorius) for the slight of daring to honk at him in traffic and refusing to apologize.

Prior to introducing Rachel (Pistorius) and her family, the film opens with The Man’s brutal attack on another home. Obviously, he has anger management issues. After targeting Rachel, he gets an inordinate amount of information from her cell phone in short period of time, helped out by the single mother not locking her phone and people making calendar appointments on spur-of-the-moment get togethers. Unhinged isn’t the kind of movie you’ll want to start questioning or dissecting how likely something may have occurred (like the chance second meeting at the gas station) as it relies completely on the rage of Crowe’s character and the pressure it can apply.

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The Invisible Man

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  • Title: The Invisible Man
  • IMDb: link

The Invisible Man Blu-ray reviewThere have been several versions of The Invisible Man over the years. The latest, from writer/director Leigh Whannell puts the focus on the victim of the title character rather than the Invisible Man himself offering a thriller about an abusive husband using advanced technology to gaslight the wife who has left him. Elisabeth Moss stars here as the terrified woman who even those closest to her believe is going insane.

When the film stays grounded (as grounded as a film about an invisible man driving his wife mad can be) it succeeds, leaving both Moss and the audience to question where the Invisible Man is in every scene (or if he’s even there at all). I think The Invisible Man would have made an excellent short film. As a feature, Whannell struggles to keep the suspense in place as the film gets increasingly goofy when our antagonist ups his game. The film’s unimaginative boilerplate ending also left me cold.

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Parasite

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Parasite
  • IMDb: link

Parasite movie reviewA family of con artists living together a cramped semi-basement apartment set their sights on a wealthy and gullible family in writer/director Bong Joon Ho‘s Parasite. Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi) is the first through the door as a tutor for the teenage daughter Da-hye (Ji-so Jung). Next comes his sister Ki-jeong (So-dam Park), as an art teacher and art therapist for the couple’s son (Hyun-jun Jung). Together the pair are able to replace the family’s driver with their father Ki-taek (Kang-ho Song) and the housekeeper (Jeong-eun Lee) with their mother (Hye-jin Jang) all while hiding the familial relationship behind the Parks’ (Sun-kyun Lee and Yeo-jeong Jo) new employees.

The insidious nature of the clan and their slow takeover of the household is fascinating to watch. What’s interesting, despite their lies and deceptions, each proves fairly good at their jobs. I won’t get into the film’s dark turn or reveal what happens in the film’s second-half other than to say the house of cards is threatened by a discovery deep in the heart of the Parks’ home in the dead of night leading to a climactic sequence of events playing out in the middle of a family celebration.

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