Few directors are quite as polarizing as M Night Shyamalan. Truth be told, Shyamalan may never make a movie as good as The Sixth Sense. And he’s made some good movies. Unbreakable showed how just how far outside the mold superhero movies could be long before Joker. Both Signs and The Village were effectively creepy […]
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Despite a January release date typically reserved for studio leftovers, Escape Room was a breakout hit in 2019. Even if it was a bit derivative of Saw, Escape Room’s box office numbers told a more accurate story than its critical reception. Director Adam Robitel (Insidious: The Last Key) made a fun, if not completely implausible, […]
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Let it be known, Unhinged was the first movie to do a wide theatrical release amidst COVID. That may be a good, bad, or completely indifferent fact. But in a year where studios delayed our most anticipated movies, Russell Crowe and company braved the pandemic and hit our local cineplexes. It’s April and I’m just […]
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Since Audrey Hepburn fought off violent criminals in 1967’s Wait Until Dark, the home-invasion thriller has been a staple of horror. From Straw Dogs to The Strangers, Hollywood has exploited the suburban nightmare of ‘others’ invading the domestic sphere. And just when the subgenre was losing steam, a handful of filmmakers found ways to subvert […]
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We’re living in a ‘Golden Age’ of content. No longer do we have to wait for the major studios to produce movies we want to see. Over the last several years, streaming platforms like Netflix, Apple, and Amazon have increasingly moved into content creation. Most recently, Netflix emerged as a big winner when the Oscar […]
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In addition to awful Christmas movies, Netflix specializes in cheap, knockoff psychological thrillers. Once upon a time, sexualized psychological thrillers – Basic Instinct, Sliver, Fatal Attraction – were hallmarks of the late 80s and early 90s. Too bad Netflix isn’t making those movies. Instead, Netflix thrillers have strayed towards bland and formulaic. Like their Christmas […]
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Following The Silence of the Lambs‘ box office and critical success, the serial killer was omnipresent in psychological thrillers. When FBI agent Robert Ressler coined the term in the early 1980s, mass media elevated the mass murderer to ]moral panic. But Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel proved the serial killer could do […]
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Aside from cooking reality shows and schmaltzy Christmas movies, Netflix seems to love nothing more than middle-of-the-road psychological thrillers. There’s Twinsanity, Bad Match, My Teacher, My Obsession, The Student, AMI. Occasionally, Netflix adds what might quality as a decent guilty-pleasure thriller. Count Fear, The Crush, and When The Bough Breaks among these selections. At present, […]
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