Category Archives: Thriller

Triple 9 review — Guns and guts in peach tree country

Directed by John Hillcoat | Written by Matt Cook | 115 min | ▲▲▲△△ Australian director Hillcoat is a deliverer of masculine, violent genre tales such as The Proposition and Lawless. While he's not colluding with his partner-in-crime Nick Cave this time out, this picture isn't much of a departure in a story of (mostly) bad men. If anything the…Read More

Sicario review — At Hell’s Border

Directed by Denis Villeneuve | Written by Taylor Sheridan | 121 min Kate (Emily Blunt, convincingly tough and vulnerable) is a straight arrow FBI agent on the anti-kidnap squad working in Arizona with partner Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya, another talented Brit import), mopping up at the margins of the Mexican drug cartel business, which usually means…Read More

The Gift review — Throwback with a sting

Written and directed by Joel Edgerton One might say the domestic thriller has gone out of fashion since its 1990s heyday, but that's not entirely true. There was the Idris Elba/Taraji P. Henson picture No Good Deed, and the Jennifer Lopez drama The Boy Next Door. Halle Berry has made a couple, too. They're often morality…Read More

LENS ME YOUR EARS Ep. 09 — Submarine movies

Stephen Cooke and I DIVE DIVE DIVE into the somewhat maligned but extremely hardy genre of submarine movies on this instalment of Lens Me Your Ears, our movie podcast. We springboard into the depths with Jude Law in Black Sea before discussing movies as diverse (or not so...) as 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Run Silent…Read More