No One Will Save You (2023) - Movie Review

This feels like the kind of flex every screenwriter-cum-director wants to make. After making his mark with some incredibly well-scripted efforts with The Babysitter, Love And Monsters, and even his directorial debut with Spontaneous, it looks like Brian Duffield wanted to show that he could tell a great story without even needing dialogue. And indeed, this is a film about a largely-mute protagonist who says all of one line, and the rest of the cast are just as silent. As someone who has been growing to love Duffield’s cinematic work, I was definitely curious about how such a venture would shape out.

Poker Face (2022) - Movie Review

I picked this film purely for nostalgic reasons, and I don’t mean that in a fond way. Russell Crowe’s directorial debut, The Water Diviner, was one of the first movies I ever reviewed on here way back in December of 2014. That was back when I was still heavily in the phase of obsessing over people who talked about movies, as opposed to obsessing over the movies themselves, and I still had a lot of growing up to do as a writer and just as a person in general. Chances are there are quite a few films from back then that I’d likely have a different take on if I were to write about them today (hell, that has definitely been the case for a few of them, like The Babadook), but Crowe’s first attempt as a director has never struck me as one of those potential examples. So, let’s see how he goes at his second attempt in the chair, and him now writing the script as well.

Windfall (2022) - Movie Review

With how badly things went with director Charlie McDowell’s last film The Discovery, a bloated and undercooked mess of a sci-fi story, seeing him go in the complete opposite direction for his latest certainly inspires some hope. It’s a single-set thriller with a minimal cast and a run time of about 88 minutes without counting the end credits, co-written by one of my favourite screenwriters in Andrew Kevin Walker. Sure, it’s also co-written by Justin Lader, one of the culprits responsible for The Discovery, but maybe this will work out better. Well, to its credit, it does, although I still don’t think it’s making the most of what little it has.

Becky (2020) - Movie Review

Any time an R18+ film comes out over here is cause for celebration, far as I’m concerned; it’s like finding a Shiny in the wild. And this one certainly earns that rating with its depiction of a young teenager waging bloody war against a gang of Neo-Nazis who invade her home. But more than anything that visceral, this film is a joy to watch because it shows its directors, Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion, at the top of their game.

ARQ (2016) - Movie Review

In the annals of speculative fiction, the very idea of time travel is one that seems to fascinate people the most. Like, to the point where even filmmakers and audiences that want nothing to do with the deeper implications of sci-fi are willing to go along with it; on paper, Groundhog Day shouldn’t have gotten as widely popular as it did. However, in spite of that, it is also one of the most problematic and fiddly sub-genres in the entirety of fiction, let alone speculative fiction. The reason for this is one of basic logic, and how most storytellers fail to take into account the extremely complex logic behind time travel, paradoxes, timelines, parallel timelines among many, many others. As such, even with the better time twisting tales that have come out recently like Looper, Edge Of Tomorrow and even (by some accounts) Predestination, plot holes make themselves quite prominent and end up tearing away at the work’s structural integrity. Will this film fall into that same trap?

Don't Breathe (2016) - Movie Review

Plot twists are one of the darker horses in the cinematic storyteller’s tool box. In the right hands, it can not only create a phenomenal switch-up to the story but also add whole new dimensions to the events within. In the wrong hands, it can come across like someone trying to guess what number they’re thinking of and the answer turns out to be “elephant”; just because we didn’t see it coming doesn’t make it any less stupid. And even then, the danger with some of the more famous plot twists is that they end up becoming the main thing that the film is remembered for, pushing its other noteworthy elements to the side in the minds of most filmgoers.

I bring all this up because this film’s approach to marketing, at least around here, has put very heavy emphasis on the fact that this film has a major plot twist. I don’t know about any of you but I’ve always seen this as a pretty wrong-headed way to get people to see a particular feature. I always thought that twists were most effective when you had no idea that they were going to happen, so imagine how it feels sitting through an entire film knowing that a twist is going to occur. The irksome trailer strikes again, only this time it isn’t just my own paranoia that says it could negatively affect the overall product. So, is it damaged all that much in light of this? This is Don’t Breathe.