Thriller

Elle

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  • Title: Elle
  • IMDb: link

Elle movie review

Isabelle Huppert is marvelous as the sixty-something head of a successful video game company who is raped in her apartment by a stranger in a ski mask. Refusing to tell the police, Michèle instead continues on as if nothing happened even as she begins to suspect that one of her resentful employees may be her attacker. Filled with mostly depressed and confused characters, somehow the film is never as bleak as its subject matter might lead you to believe.

Despite being raped in the movie’s opening scene, Michèle is anything but a victim; she’s smart, successful, and in complete control of both her company and libido. Elle isn’t a revenge fantasy or a drama focused on our protagonist coming to terms with the attack. Director Paul Verhoeven, no stranger to erotic or psychological thrillers, has something much different in mind in screenwriter David Birke‘s adaptation of Philippe Djian‘s novel. And Michèle is no angel, sleeping with the husband (Christian Berkel) of her best friend (Anne Consigny), and lusting after her neighbor (Laurent Lafitte) despite their age difference and his wife (Virginie Efira).

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Nocturnal Animals

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  • Title: Nocturnal Animals
  • IMDb: link

Nocturnal AnimalsFrom the unconventional opening credits to the crushing final scene, Nocturnal Animals is a tour-de-force you won’t be able to take you eyes off of. Using a story within a story to reveal the truth about his characters, writer/director Tom Ford delivers a taut psychological thriller involving art gallery owner Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) whose blasé hoity-toity life is shaken by the arrival of a manuscript by her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal). Shown in three interlocking tales, we are witness to Susan’s current timeline and marriage to husband number two (Armie Hammer), flashbacks of her marriage to Edward (Gyllenhaal), and the fictional tale which unfolds in brighter tones and more visceral glee than anything in her current life, rocking Susan to her core.

Of the three, it’s Edward’s manuscript which turns out to be the most impressive on film. Also casting Gyllenhaal as a husband and father whose family (Isla Fisher, Ellie Bamber) is harassed and attacked late one night on a empty stretch of road in west Texas by a group of hoodlums (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Karl Glusman, Robert Aramayo), we’re given a front-row seat to the tragic consequences of that night.

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Green Room

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Green Room
  • IMDb: link

Green RoomNotable mainly for its cast including a pair of Star Trek actors (Anton Yelchin and Patrick Stewart), Green Room is your basic wrong place, wrong time thriller when a broke band stumbles on a murder in the green room of a remote Neo-Nazi bar in the Northwest. With the help of a witness (Imogen Poots) to the murder, the band (Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, and Callum Turner) barricade themselves in the green room in an attempt to hold off the inevitable as the club’s owner (Stewart) rounds up some of the gang’s less-savory types to clean-up the situation.

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier delivers a fairly tense thriller featuring a cast of damaged individuals fighting for their lives against some pissed off Neo-Nazis. Other than Yelchin’s bassist, I’m not sure there’s a good person on-screen which means we’re interested to see what happens to the dickish rockers but not necessarily invested in rooting for or against them making it out alive. Stweart’s casting is intriguing as brains behind the outfit (although it’s fair to say he’s slumming it here).

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The Handmaiden

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  • Title: The Handmaiden
  • IMDb: link

The Handmaiden

Presented in three acts, director Chan-wook Park‘s erotic thriller inserts a new handmaiden (Tae-ri Kim) into the home of a Japanese heiress (Min-hee Kim) in Victorian-era Korea as part of a larger plot to steal the woman’s vast fortune. Part crime drama, part thriller, and part love story, The Handmaiden offers a tale of complicated motivations (where almost no one is exactly who they initially appear to be), betrayal, greed, sex, and love.

The first act of the film is presented from the role of the handmaiden, who is actually a plant to help steer the heiress into marrying her partner (Jung-woo Ha) to steal her money away from the lonely woman and her perverted uncle (Jin-woong Jo) who has his own plans for that wealth. However, when the handmaiden and her mistress begin falling for each other it throws a wrench into everyone’s plans.

The film’s second act offers a slightly different take on events from the perspective of the heiress, offering new motivations and insights, and setting up the film’s final act in where each member of the small cast will face the consequences of their actions.

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Allied

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

AlliedThere’s so much wrong with Allied it’s hard to know where to start. At times director Robert Zemeckis‘ film is laughably, occasionally excruciatingly, bad. In its best moments Allied is ill-conceived, and it doesn’t have many of those.

Who thought it was good idea to set a WWII movie in Casablanca? The script by Steven Knight (Burnt, Seventh Son, Eastern Promises) plays like a bad romance novel mashed-up with a hollow spy thriller. The result might make for an okay trashy vacation read on the beach but fails spectacularly on film.

Reminding you immediately of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Casablanca, spies Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) and Marianne Beauséjour (Marion Cotillard) meet in Casablanca. Assigned by their respective countries to work together to kill a high-ranking Nazi officer, the pair play husband and wife while falling into causal sex which I guess is supposed to look like love on film. (It doesn’t.) In a move that seems completely out of the blue, after completing their mission, Max invites Marianne to return to England with him and be his wife. And life is good, for awhile, until Max discovers that his wife may be a German spy.

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