Category Archives: Thrillers

Nobody review – Bob Odenkirk betters John Wick in fun action caper

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The Better Call Saul star gets a furiously entertaining star vehicle playing a suburban father who finds himself up against the Russian mob

For any vaguely fit actor over the age of 50, being given your own Taken was briefly seen as an enviable career boost, a chance to relive former glories, a slickly choreographed leap from an early Hollywood grave back to the sandlot. Ever since Liam Neeson swapped emoting for punching back in 2008, Kevin Costner, Sean Penn, John Travolta, Pierce Brosnan and Guy Pearce all tried to do the same but audiences wisely stayed away from their sub-par shoot-em-ups and execs were forced to realise that, duh, it’s the star rather than the sub-genre that people are magnetically drawn to. Because Neeson’s shtick was continuing to bring in solid crowds while his peers were flailing and in 2014, Keanu Reeves found a similar sweet spot with John Wick, kicking off a hugely profitable new series with a Taken-adjacent combination of simple action plot and much-loved actor.

Related: Chaos Walking review – cursed YA adaptation stumbles into view

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Nest of Vampires review – a bloodless bid for the title of worst film ever

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This horror story about an MI5 agent and a gang supplying girls for ritual sacrifice is on a par with the monumentally terrible Plan 9 from Outer Space

There are bad movies, the kind of third-rate film-making we see all the time, and then there are transcendentally bad movies that can only result from deep, fanatical attachment to the material. Director, writer and producer Chris Sanders here achieves something on a par with Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space or Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. His Nest of Vampires is a little-England horror-thriller with a plot as over-larded as an Elvis sandwich, uniformly appalling acting, and the same almost beatific earnestness as those two legendary films.

MI5 agent Kit Valentine (Tom Fairfoot) leaves his London stamping ground to shake down some unnamed English town for a human trafficking ring that – after his wife is murdered – has abducted his daughter. He needs to get a move on, because the network sells off the girls to moneyed clients to butcher in satanic rituals. Not racy enough? Some of the criminals are also vampires who like a “nibble” on the customers. And Valentine is further up against it when his bosses reveal they are in cahoots. Tied to a chair, though, he has news for them: “You’re not the only secret society that operates within MI5.” Then his own canines turn extra-pointy.

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Come True review – blow-out imagery in visionary sleep disorder thriller

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An insomniac student is haunted by a demonic figure in this flamboyant and stylised waking dream of a film

There is something visionary about this near-nonsensical, kitsch but atmospheric techno-thriller from Canadian director Anthony Scott Burns. Drawn along on dark somnambulic rhythms, it incorporates elements of fantasy, horror and 80s synthwave aesthetics without giving itself over completely to any of them.

A wordless first 10 minutes introduces us to Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), a runaway student apparently unwelcome or unwilling to return home, waking in spectrally lit parks and falling asleep in coffee shops. Dropping suddenly into surrealistic CGI dreams that track inexorably towards a demonic figure who, if approached too closely, wakes her with a start. Sarah decides to try and climb out of this insomniac bath by enrolling in a university sleep study. It is overseen by Dr Meyer, a Cronenbergian academic in big glasses, but run by a trio of researchers who, like the memory technicians in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, have a loose relationship with scientific protocol. Becoming close to Jeremy (Landon Liboiron), she learns that they are using pioneering technology to observe the subjects’ dreams – and that the same shadowy presence manifests in all of them.

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‘I think I’ve written more Sherlock Holmes than even Conan Doyle’: the ongoing fight to reimagine Holmes

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Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective has been endlessly rewritten. But nearly a century after the author’s death, how new writers portray him remains contested

The first ever mention of Sherlock Holmes came in A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887. Dr Watson is looking for lodgings, and meets an old acquaintance who knows of someone he could share with, but does not recommend.

Young Stamford looked rather strangely at me over his wine-glass. ‘You don’t know Sherlock Holmes yet,’ he said; ‘perhaps you would not care for him as a constant companion.’

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‘I was appalled to be tarred as misogynist’: Variety critic hits back at Carey Mulligan’s sexism accusations

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Exclusive: Dennis Harvey, the critic whose review of Promising Young Woman prompted outrage from its star and an apology from his editors, has spoken out

Dennis Harvey, the veteran film critic whose review of Promising Young Woman has sparked a furore across the industry, has hit back at accusations of misogyny amid calls for Variety to fire him.

Harvey’s review was published more than a year ago, following the film’s premiere at the Sundance film festival. Largely positive, it called Mulligan’s performance “skilful, entertaining and challenging” while also querying the central casting. While “a fine actress”, wrote Harvey, Mulligan “seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale”.

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Imperial Blue review – Ugandan adventures of a drug-smuggling dope

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A dealer who dreams of discovering the source of a mystical substance that lets you see the future heads deep into Africa

Drug smuggler Hugo (Nicolas Fagerberg) has “the connect”. Or he’d like to think he does. Certainly this debut feature from British director Dan Moss knows several good spots, guiding us through a series of impressive locations with the confidence of a seasoned traveller. After Hugo’s big-money hashish deal in a partly flooded Mumbai building site goes wrong, he’s introduced to Bulu, a blue-powdered hallucinogen with mystical properties. “They say it makes you see the future,” says his go-between (Ashish Verma). Could this mysterious substance make Hugo enough money to satisfy his UK-based bosses? He’ll have to track down a supply source first.

Everything about the London drug world that Hugo then stops off in – from the 80s punk get-ups of the big players to the readiness with which these supposedly shrewd operators approve Hugo’s wild goose chase – is risibly unrealistic. But he’s soon en route to “Fort Lugard, Uganda”, where the plot is on safer ground.

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Franka Potente: How we made Run Lola Run

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‘I had to sprint across Berlin in a pair of Dr Marten boots – and I was smoking two packs a day back then’

I was in New York shooting a couple of films when I got this script called Lola Rennt (Lola Runs). I read it and thought: “This is cool – but kind of weird, too.” I flew back to Berlin, met the writer-director Tom Tykwer, and realised the energy I had felt on the page came from him.

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Michael Apted: a vital and dignified director who understood how class shapes us all

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Apted made his name with the brilliant Up TV series that examined people’s lives every seven years, before going on to become a film-maker of distinction, whose influence cannot be overstated

Michael Apted, who has died aged 79, was a British movie director who – like Ken Loach and Ken Russell – earned his stripes working on TV. But it was his destiny to help create an epic ongoing masterpiece for the small screen with truly cinematic scope and beyond: current-affairs television which had the scale of cinema, combined with the Mass Observation Project and the Roman census.

Granada Television’s Seven Up! from 1964, was, to quote a comedy of the era, not so much a programme, more a way of life. It took 14 British children at the Jesuit age of seven (that is, the age at which the Jesuits’ St Ignatius of Loyola famously said he could “show you the man” if schooled early enough) and interviewed them about their lives and opinions – seven from a working-class background and seven from a posher caste. Then it was updated every seven years, finally spanning 56 years.

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How Promising Young Woman shows the limits of #MeToo revenge

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The tart Oscar-tipped dark comedy offers an intoxicating revenge plot against bad men. But can insight be found in assuming everyone’s worst potential?

Promising Young Woman, writer/director Emerald Fennell’s acidic dark comedy which coats an incendiary rape revenge plot with a pastel sheen, runs an alluring, looping trap: Cassie, a singularly obsessed character played with singularly impressive depth by Carey Mulligan, pretends to be near-passed-out drunk at a bar, plays along to a skeevy man’s predatory machinations, then flips the switch when he begins to sexually assault a woman he believes is too drunk to notice or care. “What are you doing?” she asks, suddenly stone-cold sober. The first time Cassie pulls the trap, in the film’s first sequence, it’s not quite shocking – if you’ve seen the trailer, you know her revenge scheme – but given that it’s The OC heartthrob Adam Brody as the aw-shucks predator, Mulligan’s archly calibrated facade drop is an enticing and unnerving jolt.

Related: Promising Young Woman review – Carey Mulligan ignites fiery #MeToo revenge tale

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Dune, Bond and Top Gun returns: Films to look out for in 2021

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Daniel Craig hands in his licence to kill, Frances McDormand delivers her best ever performance, Carey Mulligan unsettles in a rape-revenge drama and Tom Cruise reaches for the skies … this year’s must-see films

Paul Greengrass’s latest film is based on the western novel by Paulette Jiles, about a girl returning to her family in 1860s Texas after being kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe. Helena Zengel plays the girl, Johanna, and Tom Hanks plays the man who must look after her: Captain Kidd, an ex-army veteran who makes a living reading aloud from newspapers to illiterate townsfolk, and who is now in the middle of a very big news story.
• Released in the UK on 1 January

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Stacey Abrams: Georgia’s political heroine … and romance author

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Writing under the name Selena Montgomery, Abrams has penned eight romantic thrillers, often while also fighting for voters’ rights

Stacey Abrams is the former Georgia state house minority leader, whose fierce fight for Georgians’ right to vote has been credited for potentially handing the state to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years. But Abrams has another identity: the novelist Selena Montgomery, a romance and thriller writer who has sold more than 100,000 copies of her eight novels.

Abrams wrote her first novel during her third year at Yale Law School, inspired after reading her ex-boyfriend’s PhD dissertation in chemical physics. She had wanted to write a spy novel: “For me, for other young black girls, I wanted to write books that showed them to be as adventurous and attractive as any white woman,” she wrote in her memoir Minority Leader. But after being told repeatedly by editors that women don’t read spy novels, and that men don’t read spy novels by women, she made her spies fall in love. Rules of Engagement, her debut, was published in 2001, and sees temperatures flare as covert operative Raleigh partners with the handsome Adam Grayson to infiltrate a terrorist group that has stolen deadly environmental technology.

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