Only a month ago that I saw this and I couldn't tell you much about how it ended. So there's limits on how memorable an experience it will give you, in terms of plot, but as a movie with vivid characters and a strong atmosphere this one is aces. It's all about Zora Howard, a talented young playwright who is also an incredibly powerful performer — she co-wrote the movie with director Rashaad Ernesto Greene and also plays Ayanna, the…
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Here Before 2021
Not a horror film. Not a psychological thriller. It touches on the eerie and unsettling, but there's a tricky zone where a movie that generates some creepiness without fully taking shape as a horror film or thriller feels like a tease. Here Before landed right in there for me. The director (Stacey Gregg) calls it a "psychological drama" but also acknowledges that it has some "hybrid genre" elements. That's fair, but I'll add the caveat that…
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Friday the 13th 2009
Eli was just about willing to humor me by watching one of these. I would have liked to return to the first one, for the sake of respecting the ancestors — I've just started reading Adam Rockoff's Going to Pieces, so that's where my head is right now, back in the late 1970s, thinking about the beginnings. But Eli was like "I'm hoping it will be nasty" and I just thought a movie from the 1980s wasn't going to cut…
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Collateral 2004
Subgenres of the thriller genre:
1. the thriller as art film, where the artist cannot stoop to actually thrilling his audience
2. the thriller as philosophical rubbernecking, where we are invited to meditate upon the nature of evil — as severed heads roll our way
3. the thriller as pastiche of esoteric pop-culture references
4. the redundant thriller, either a remake of a good thriller or adaptation of a good novel, or both
My highest praise of Collateral is that…
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