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Tag: Thriller

Truth About Charlie, The (2002)

Thriller Rated PG-13

A botched remake of the 1963 Audrey Hepburn-Cary Grant romance thriller involving lost money and mistaken identities in Paris. Thandie Newton does a serviceable Hepburn impersonation, but Mark Wahlberg couldn’t evoke Grant if he tried, so he doesn’t. Meanwhile, director Jonathan Demme is too busy making irrelevant references to films of the French New Wave

Rear Window (1954)

Thriller Rated NR

“We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms.” So says Thelma Ritter in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. If she’s right, the movies are partly to blame. This is a movie about watching others – it taps into the very voyeurism that drives the cinema. Ritter plays Stella, nurse to James Stewart’s L.B. Jefferies, a photographer who

Dirty Pretty Things (2002)

Thriller Rated R

A riveting combination of thriller and social drama, Dirty Pretty Things steeps us in London’s exploited immigrant subculture. The story follows a doctor-turned-hotel clerk from Nigeria (a mesmerizing Chiwetel Ejiofor) who stumbles across a heinous black-market operation at his hotel and is forced to either participate or be deported. From director Stephen Frears.

Disturbia (2007)

Thriller Rated PG-13

“The preposterousness of Disturbia increases at an alarming rate … until you finally start losing track of all of your objections.

Butterfly Effect, The (2004)

Thriller Rated R

You’ve got to hand it to a movie brazen enough to kill both animals and babies in bids for audience sympathy. The Butterfly Effect – in which Ashton Kutcher plays a student who can return to his childhood, alter an event and then awaken to a new future – relies on beatings, infanticide, the murder

Murder by Numbers (2002)

Thriller Rated R

Two bored high-schoolers (the equally creepy Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) find a way other than multiple-choice quizzes to test their considerable smarts by plotting the intricate murder of a random stranger. Sandra Bullock plays the cop on their trail, and the attention paid to all three characters gives this genre exercise a surprising resonance.

Suspect Zero (2004)

Thriller Rated R

Suspect Zero tries to resurrect the serial-killer thriller by sadly mimicking the television series “The X-Files.” It’s a double-whammy loser. Filling in for Scully and Mulder are Carrie-Anne Moss and Aaron Eckhart, both of whom deserve better roles than those of the romantically entangled FBI agents on the trail of a child-murderer here. Also questionably

Premonition (2007)

Thriller Rated PG-13

“…feels like it was concocted in some sort of hormonal haze, say maybe in the seventh month of a pregnancy.

Zodiac (2007)

Thriller Rated R

“The fixated cop is a thriller cliche, but Fincher helps us understand how you could become addicted to the prospect of finding just one more clue around the next corner.

Gift, The (2000)

Thriller Rated R

A misstep for director Sam Raimi, this thriller about a psychic reader (Cate Blanchett) who investigates a murder in her backwoods Georgia town may cover similar territory as Raimi’s excellent A Simple Plan, but it’s as overblown as that naturalistic crime tragedy was understated. Unhappily misused here is a fine cast, including Keanu Reeves, Hilary

Recent Reviews

By the Time It Gets Dark (2016)

Drama Rated NR

“While always mesmerized, I admittedly got lost amidst the layers…”

Two Minutes Late (1952)

Drama Rated NR

“… aims to be a big-screen version of a lurid pulp crime novel.”

Xiao Wu (Pickpocket) (1997)

Drama Rated NR

“… a scrappy, neo-realist tale of societal scrounging that’s paused by poetic moments of slow cinema.”


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