Neil Marshall’s nerve wracking, claustrophobic survival thriller about six spelunking women turns into a gripping horror film featuring the creepiest cave dwellers to skitter across a screen.
Tag: Lionsgate
‘Enchanted April’ – an Italian escape on Amazon Prime
Four women break out of their confined lives and roles when they rent a Italian villa in this romantic drama of reawakening. Josie Lawrence, Miranda Richardson, Polly Walker, and Joan Plowright costar with the beautiful Mediterranean landscape.
‘Wind River’ – Frontier justice on Netflix
Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen star in the lean, stripped down crime thriller set in the Wyoming wilderness, written and directed by Taylor Sheridan (creator of ‘Yellowstone’).
‘Haywire’ – bad-ass action on HBO Max
Haywire (2011) is Steven Soderbergh’s drive-in assassin action movie by way of a sleek art-house conspiracy thriller. According to the director, the film sprung from his desire to develop a film around the talents and skill of mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, and the finished film — which casts Carano as a covert agent […]
Ava DuVernay’s ‘Middle of Nowhere’ on Netflix
Before directing Selma and A Wrinkle in Time, Ava DuVernay made Middle of Nowhere (2012), a small story about a woman who put her aspirations on hold when her husband goes to prison. Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi) drops out of medical school and takes a nursing job so that she can be at home for daily calls from […]
Paul Schrader’s ‘First Reformed’ on Showtime Anytime and Kanopy
Anyone who has followed the career of Paul Schrader could fall into the trap of simply cataloguing the ways in which First Reformed (2018) is a summation of his themes and inspirations. Imagine the promotional possibilities: “From the author of “Transcendental Cinema” and “Notes on Film Noir” and the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and The Last […]
The original ‘The Wicker Man’ on Amazon Prime
The original The Wicker Man (1973) begins as a murder mystery and turns into something else entirely. Edward Woodward stars as the stiff English police detective who is sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl and discovers a culture living a happy “heathen” lifestyle, lorded over (literally) by […]
‘It Comes at Night’ on Netflix and free on Kanopy
The title of It Comes at Night (2017) sets certain expectations. What exactly comes at night? But the survival thriller from writer/director Trey Edward Shults, set sometime after the ravages of an unnamed and unexplained plague have ripped through the cities and sent survivors into the isolation of the wilderness, isn’t about monsters (human or […]
TVD: ‘Westworld’ reborn, ‘American Gods’ debuts, the beginning of the end of ‘Game of Thrones’
Westworld: Season One – The Maze (HBO, Blu-ray, DVD) Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld was a clever science fiction thriller about a theme park that provided interactive adventures with robotic hosts. The 2016 series developed and produced for HBO by Jonathan Nolan (Person of Interest) and his creative partner and wife Lisa Joy uses the […]
Blu-ray round-up: Boxes of ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ and ‘Hellraiser,’ anniversary editions of ‘Jerry Maguire’ and ‘Dirty Dancing,’ and more
I try to keep up on the most interesting releases on Blu-ray and DVD but I don’t have the time to cover everything in the detail it deserves. Here are some of the special editions and stand-out releases that have come out over the past few weeks. The Man Who Fell To Earth (Lionsgate, Blu-ray), […]