Thriller

Our Kind of Traitor

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Our Kind of Traitor
  • IMDb: link

Our Kind of TraitorAs spy stories often do, Our Kind of Traitor opens in Russia. However, for our protagonist things begin far away from Moscow. On vacation with his wife Gail (Naomie Harris), Perry (Ewan McGregor) has a chance encounter with a Russian gangster named Dima (Stellan Skarsgård). One wild night later, Perry is presented with an offer he can’t refuse.

With the murder of his business partner and his entire family in the movie’s opening scene, Dima is desperate for any help he can get. As unlikely a candidate a college poetry professor is, Perry proves to be Dima’s only hope to save himself and his family from meeting the same gruesome fate. Convincing Perry to take a flash drive to MI6 on his return to London proves to be only the first step in getting the professor caught up in the world of the Russian money launderer.

Like many spy novels, Our Kind of Traitor offers various twists and turns including a British agent (Damian Lewis) who lies to get Dima’s information for personal reasons leading to further complications. And like many movies adapted from novels, I’m guessing the book was better.

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10 Cloverfield Lane

/ / Home Video
  • Title: 10 Cloverfield Lane
  • IMDb: link

10 Cloverfield LaneI had very mixed reactions to 2008’s shaky-cam monster movie Cloverfield which kept me from seeing this sequel of sorts in theaters. Only tangentially connected to the first film, 10 Cloverfield Lane is an old school psychological thriller which begins when Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is run off the road one night and wakes up chained to a mattress in an underground bunker with a pair of strange men (John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr.).

When the owner of the bunker (Goodman) explains that the world is under attack from aliens, which he saved her from, Michelle can offer only skepticism and struggle to escape. However, as events unfold and she gleans the truth of what happened to the outside world and her captor, the story will take several interesting turns. The first-third of the film plays out like a classic Twilight Zone episode with Michelle struggling to escape only to discover that everything which Howard has told her is true. Although the middle of the film drags at times, tension ramps up in the final act with another discovery by Michelle which once again will alter the status quo.

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The Neon Demon

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Neon Demon
  • IMDb: link

“Beauty isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”

The Neon Demon

In what is likely going to be one of the more divisive films of 2016, the latest from writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) casts Elle Fanning as a naive 16 year-old girl just breaking into the model business in Los Angeles. Blessed with an ineffable quality no one can quite explain, Jesse (Fanning) soon becomes the hot new girl, much to the dismay of a pair of models (Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee) seeing their careers flash before their eyes.

Jesse’s journey will lead her into contact with a wide variety of people including her creepy apartment manager (Keanu Reeves), jealous models, designers, photographers (Desmond Harrington and Karl Glusman), and a makeup artist (Jena Malone) all of whom want something from the young woman.

Refn’s film is a metaphor for how the modeling industry celebrates physical beauty in the absence of any other quality while slowly devouring the very objects of their devotion. The film takes the metaphor one step too far in the final act leaving the film with an ending that satisfies the movie’s message but not necessarily the audience.

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Malice

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Malice
  • IMDb: link

Malice

1993’s Malice is your typical thriller, except for the fact that everyone involved isn’t typical at all. Written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, The Newsroom, and Sports Night) and Scott Frank (Out of Sight, the underrated Heaven’s Prisoners, and The Lookout) and starring Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, and Bill Pullman, the story takes an expected number of twists and turns down a dark road until the truth is fully revealed. And you also may have heard of its cinematographer Gordon Willis who shot a little series known as The Godfather Trilogy.

The story centers around a young couple (Pullman and Kidman) whose lives are shattered when their friend (Baldwin) operates on her making a mistake in surgery that costs her the ability to have children. The fallout for the couple and the doctor leads to grief, a lawsuit, and the husband to begin looking into a situation that he discovers is far more complicated than he ever imagined.

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Survivor

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Survivor
  • IMDb: link

SurvivorSometimes a movie just doesn’t work. There are plenty of more successful films with less going for them than James McTeigue‘s Survivor which stars Milla Jovovich as a Foreign Service Agent in London who uncovers a terrorist plot and spends most of the movie running not only from British authorities but a high-class assassin (Pierce Brosnan) responsible for the deaths of her co-workers.

For an action-thriller Survivor is a bore. Brosnan barely registers a pulse as the cold-blooded killer. Jovovich is fine as the woman on the run. The plot, while indistinguishable from any number of action films (other than Jovovich’s specific job), is passable enough but there’s simply no magic on-screen leading to an underwhelming and underachieving movie that’s no so much awful as completely forgettable.

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