Despite the Title, The Good Liar Can’t Deceive as Deftly as it Should
If you’re a fan of trashy thrillers and farfetched twists overlaid with a veneer of sophistication, you could do worse.
Jordan Peele Interrogates the Horror of Middle Class Obliviousness with Us
The depth and ambiguity of Us’s underlying metaphors is thought-provoking in a way that eclipses its contemporaries.
The Commuter (2018)
Like Non-Stop, The Commuter twists absurd action around an Agatha-Christie-esque closed-room mystery.
The Girl on the Train (2016)
Some say Tate Taylor’s latest directorial effort is a return to the days of Hitchcock thrillers but sadly The Girl on the Train is riddled with cinematic mishaps that distract from what could be a great film.
Body Double (1984)
Brian De Palma’s films are an acquired taste. That’s especially apparent with Body Double, an uninviting experience for those unfamiliar with the director with plenty to offer those who’ve come around to his distinctive style. As a straightforward (and rather lurid) thriller, it’s somewhat unsatisfactory, hamstrung by its inherent implausibility and its leading man’s anti-charisma.…
Sydney Film Festival: Phoenix (2014)
I spent so long trying to untangle the allegorical and psychological underpinning of Christian Petzold’s post-Holocaust drama, Phoenix, that it took me a while to recognise how profoundly unmoved it left me. It’s not that I couldn’t embrace its implausible premise – where a concentration camp survivor (Nina Hoss) returns to her husband (Ronald Zehrfeld)…
Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (2014)
Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance is a divisive film, leading this year’s Golden Globe nominees and attracting a suite of five star reviews on one hand and repulsed pans on the other. It’s the sort of film that invites – nay, demands – hyperbole. The screenplay even presents the viewer with two distinct…
Jacques Tati: The Restored Collection
I am all about director boxsets. There’s something intimidating about the exploration required to engage in completionist cinephilia, where you endeavour to see every single picture a director filmed, so it’s a relief to simply plonk a box down on your shelf and set yourself a more manageable goal, rather than scurrying around the outskirts…
The Two Faces of January (2014)
The Two Faces of January is set in 1962, but it could just have easily been made in the same year, or even a decade earlier. The film – from Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini – is a close facsimile of the thrillers of half a century ago, to the point where it could be a…
Dressed to Kill (1980)
Brian de Palma’s work always has gigantic quotation marks about. He doesn’t tell stories; he makes “cinema.” His larger-than-life, garishly coloured style is best suited to big movies, stories of sex, violence and oversized emotions. On paper, his style seems perfectly suited to the lurid psychosexual thriller-cum-horror movie Dressed to Kill. There are some thrilling…
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