Thriller
Back in 2007 director Tony Gilroy delivered one of the year’s best films in Michael Clayton. Fast forward 24 months and we find the writer/director back on similar territory with his stylish follow-up, Duplicity.
The movie is aptly titled given that things are never quite what they seem. And like the two central characters – played with aplomb by Clive Owen and Julia Roberts – the audience is constantly kept on its feet in a world of double-crosses.
As good as Clayton? Nah. Better than Transformers 2? Does the Pope like biscuits?
Everybody does…
In a nutshell Gilroy shifts the action from the seedy legal underbelly of Michael Clayton to the slimy world of corporate espionage.
But unlike the ruthless depiction of America’s legal elite in Clayton, Gilroy adopts a more playful approach with Duplicity.
Sure, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture of corporate America, but Duplicity throws out more one-liners than a cracked-up Scrabble player.
Roberts and Owen revel in their roles as corporate operatives who join forces to pull off the biggest heist of their careers. Tension ensues as the ultimate game of cat-and-mouse descends into one double cross after another.
And the slick dialogue – which at times resembles verbal tennis – meshes well with a plot full of twists and turns.
Looks and brains…?
Duplicity opens with a gloriously unusual slow motion fight between corporate tycoons Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson. Stylistically it bears no resemblence to the slick cinematography that follows. But as a set piece I found this daringly unusual intro genuinely funny.
The 24-esque split screen interludes were less appealing but nonetheless served to underscore the movie’s spy-like credentials.
At a running time of 125 minutes, Duplicity loses some of its sizzle in the third act as the intricate plot unravels, but the anticlimactic pay-off is worth it. At least, I thought so.
I’m a big fan of film noir and would cite classics such as The Big Sleep and Chinatown among my all time favourites.
And while Duplicity fails to reach the creative heights of such masterpieces, it oozes dialogue capable of rivalling landmark films.
Sleek, sexy, and smart…. and I’m not just talking about Julia Roberts.
In this movie, werewolves and vampires, two great enemies, must work together to fight a newborn army of bloodthirsty vampires. Jacob black(taylor lautner) and edward collins(robert pattinson) must also put their differences aside to protect their love bella(kristen). This is a great action-packed thriller filled with romance. This movie will get you excited for the next twilight. It is a must see. For boys and girls. So buy your tickets now and watch this movie As Soon As Possible.
A thriller that promises you $20k and suddenly grabs you by the horns!
I wake up one morning to a dvd in mail. It reads, "Chance to win $20000.00, crack the code". Now they have my interest. I have just moved to United States after a stint with a major Indian newspaper to review Bollywood films. I ask myself,"How the hell did they find me". I had not even informed my dear friends about the move. So I popped the DVD in player thinking that these guys have to be real desperate. And boy, Was I right? The first half of movie sucked like rotten tomatoes. I wanted to turn it off but that code and $20K? Now here's the deal! Film-makers wanted me to identify the four digit numerical code, basically four single digits in the order that they appear in the film, input at their website, make 20K. SO pretty much I sulking through the film, looking for my money until the film actually grabbed me by my horns. Holy cow! I did not even realize, when it happened? I was hooked and last 45 minutes were like, Okay! may be you deserve a review. So here I am, an indie thriller from bollywood, which opens like a trashy B grade film school kind of deal, develops into something that holds your attention for 45 long minutes. It may not be in my best interest to write this review, since I was looking for ways to win that $20K but it is hard. May be they forgot to place the code in my DVD. Per their movie website, the code appears only in theatrical version. Now a reviewer is going to a theatrical screening of a film, to make some money. Regarding the film, it's all right. Where's my money?
The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s latest movie is a well-crafted and well-acted thriller.
The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s latest movie is a well-crafted and well-acted thriller. At the centre of the plot are a former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang ,who has received a 10 Million dollar cheque to publish his memoir and an unnamed ghost writer who is hired by the publisher to rework the far too boring manuscript and turn it into a commercial bestseller. Pierce Brosnan plays a Tony Blair-inspired Lang and he delivers one of his finest performances in years, at least since his underrated yet brilliant The Matador. Ewan McGregor is the Ghost in the title and, like Brosnan, he is as well on top form. He plays a character who is not only without a name, but also without a family, or history. His only friend or the only person he phones during the whole movie is his agent. We learn from the beginning that he is also a not particularly successful writer, his latest work was in fact the biography of a magician titled “I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered”. He is, in other words, the perfect ghost for the work and the empty vessel at the audience’s disposal to travel through the story. McGregor is however genuine and believable throughout his whole act, even when the script and Mr. Polanski’s direction put him in situations that border parody – as in one of his scenes – kind of hot – with Lang’s wife Ruth (an excellent Olivia Williams), a Cherie Blair’s inspired character.
From the outset rewriting Lang’s manuscript seems a straightforward, boring but well paid job ($250 thousand dollars for a few weeks errand). But the more the Ghost settles within Lang’s environment the more he finds out that things are not as simple as they look. The opening (brilliant) scene of the movie informs us that the body of the former ghost writer (also Lang’s closest aide for years) was recently found washed ashore on the gray and rainy coast of Martha’s Vineyard (USA), the island were Lang is currently living with his entourage trying to finish the book in time for publication. Dismissed officially as alcohol’s induced suicide or simple accident, McGregor finds out that the death of the aide may not be that accidental. An old man (Eli Wallach) tells him that if one considers the currents that sweep the island the body should have never washed where it was found. He also uncovers – by chance – evidences of inconsistencies in Lang’s manuscript. He things they might be the reasons why the former aide ended up drunk and dead in the Ocean.
Meanwhile, Lang is under heavy fire from his own home front. The public hates him for his support of the invasion of Iraq. And now his former foreign minister accuses him of having allegedly authorized the CIA to deport and torture terrorist suspects out from Britain. Lang risks an indictment from the International Criminal Court of Justice for his role in the matter. The public is outraged and wants his head; his only ally is the US-Bush-like administration, embodied here by a US secretary that is evidently modelled on Condoleezza Rice. For the publisher, on the other hand, this is all good news, the media event stirred by the foreign minister’s revelation will mean an increase in sales. The book must be finished as soon as possible.
I cannot reveal more of the plot, it would spoil your pleasure. I can tell you though that at times I had the impression that Polanski was playing us fools with too many threads to follow and not all of them necessary or plausible. But they help building the suspense, setting the scene and putting the characters in context. This is a thriller seen through the eyes of a character who is not well aware of what is going on; add to that that he is also just a modest writer; and certainly not a hot-shot private-eye, then you will understand why his investigation proceeds without following a precise logic, in fact it is often strikingly amateurish. Undoubtedly, he makes some arguable choices during his quest to find the truth. Yet, this is not a flaw of the script, in fact, McGregor’s choices and his mistakes are perfectly understandable and logical, they below to his character. The ghost finds about things out of curiosity or mere luck, as it happens when he is set – accidentally and literally – on the trail that presumably caused the death of the former ghost.
The first five minutes of the movie might give you a heads up on the mood of the movie: we follow McGregor in his journey from London to Martha’s Vineyard (the original location of the movie however is the German island of Sylt). Polanski films this scene skilfully. We – the audience – see McGregor battling with sleep and jet-leg tiredness while trying to understand what is going on. Meanwhile the sky and the sea get ever gayer and rain starts falling. The start, fleetingly, reminded me of the plot line in Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia where Al Pacino’s character struggles throughout the movie with his tiredness. The first part of The Ghost Writer is similar: McGregor tries to adjust to the new environment and time-zone, he is tired and things look blurred. Slowly the mist before his eyes (and ours) disappears and everything becomes clear, but not until the very end of the movie. To repeat, the plot is at times weak and throws in far too many story lines, and in my opinion it leans too-much on the Blair-Lang resemblance to confuse the audience and avoid going too much into the details of the story behind Lang’s manuscript – which at the end we find out hides in fact quite a simple, almost banal riddle. This makes the story far too thin, but nevertheless compelling, this is thanks especially to Polanski’s smooth direction and the actors’ performance.
The movie is not so much about the final revelation or the politics behind it; it is more about the relationships among the characters involved in the story, it is about bitterness and love, trust and betrayal. To some extent the movie reminded me of Hitchcock’s The Rope where we know from the beginning that a dead body is hidden in the living room, but what it matters there is the relationship between the two who committed the murder and their former mentor, James Stewart; at the centre of that plot is the dialectic between the three different points of view. The best parts in The Ghost Writer are in fact the duets between McGregor and Brosnan (the one on the plane is excellent) and Mcgregor with Olivia Williams.
The final scene of the movie is quite outstanding, but at the same time it could have been set differently. I haven’t read Robert Harris’ The Ghost – the book on which the movie is based – so I am not sure how the story ends in that book, but in the film Polanski (who shares writing credits with Mr. Harris for the screenplay) opts for a closure rather than leaving the story open-ended. I shall not spoil it, but in the final scene, just before the final closing shot, when we – the audience – are finally revealed the truth about Lang’s mysterious manuscript, Polanski takes an other leaf out from Hitchcock’s book and he does it once again brilliantly: there is a folded piece of paper which is passed from hand to hand that carries with it the revelation that we have been waiting for, the tension builds up to the perfect pitch and eventually we finally see it shaped into the facial expressions of the two characters at the centre of that scene. Polanski could have and should have ended the movie there or soon after, but in fact he goes a bit too far. The end-point of the story comes too quickly and it is therefore almost unbelievable. Polanski should have left the story open-ended, may be taking a leaf or two from other directors, I am thinking for instance of the end in Blade Runner’s the director’s cut.
It is worth mentioning that – if you know anything about Polanski’s long-lasting troubles with the US Justice system – you cannot fail to spot two or three parallels between Lang’s issues and the director’s own story. But these are however non-essential themes; the audience does not need to know about them to appreciate the movie.
The Ghost Writer will not be the best thriller you have ever watched. It is nor Sydney Pollack’s The Three Days of the Condor, neither is Polanski’s own masterpiece Chinatown; and albeit it quotes here and there Hitchcock, it is not in the same league with Vertigo or Rear Window. Nonetheless, The Ghost Writer is a fine artisan job. The product of a director that knows one or two things about thrillers and good movies. That is, one or two things more than any other James Cameron out there. The Ghost Writer is one of those movies that have become a rarity in CGI 3D Hollywood dominated cinemas. There are no visible CGI effects here; nor bombastic car chases or noisy explosions; in fact there are only one or two car accidents; one or two bullets exploded, but there is quite a good amount of suspense, and that is I believe what it counts the most when you make a thriller.
Time runs slow in this movie and the gray-dark palette sets the tone of the movie perfectly. The sky is almost always gray and the air seems full of rain. In times when good movies are more and more a rarity, The Ghost Writer is beyond doubt an unexpected treat. Go and see it.
Triangle is a well developed and very intelligent thriller from director christopher smith. The storyline and dialogue give a interesting approach to this type of film genre. The pefromances in the movie are very realistic and build up tension between the main characters. The plot does get very confusing through the movie and you might get lost through the the predictable plot holes. However, the film has a suspenseful atmosphere and creative plot twist which will definitely entertain you!
Mel Gibson is back, and the years have not been kind to him.
OK, it’s unfair to point out how he’s aged, or whether he can overcome the stigma of his infamous drunken rant. But kudos that he manages a convincing, muscular performance, never losing audience sentiment and interest in his character’s harrowing journey.
What isn’t unfair to point out is the film’s by-the-numbers revenge melodrama-cum-thriller plotting, its laziness in creating believable villains, and its overall gutlessness. The bravest thing here is Gibson, just for showing up. It hints at the classic bleak ending of similar espionage thrillers, but then cops out with a shootout almost as laughable as ‘The Departed’s (also from co-writer William Monahan) and a wishy-washy sentimental tag to the overarching tragedy.
It feels like an extremely low-rent ‘Constant Gardener’. Which is a shame, because it wastes Gibson’s comeback and fellow tough guy Ray Winstone’s subtle and top-notch performance. It may promise to take you to the ‘Edge Of Darkness’, but you’ll never even make it to the edge of your seat.
Silly, slightly disappointing ‘70s heist thriller remake with Denzel Washington and John Travolta barely getting out of second gear as they verbally spar with each other during a hostage situation on the New York subway.
Never underestimate Tony Scott’s (‘Man On Fire’, ‘Last Boy Scout’, ‘Deja Vu’) ability to insert random acts of violence, urban destruction and people shooting other people into a film. ‘Pelham 123’ begs to be a taut, suspenseful psychological thriller about an ambitious heist (much like the far superior original) and a masterful battle of wits between a disgraced public official and a criminal mastermind. You’ve got 2 great actors (though Travolta needs the smugness slapped out of his performances on occasion) and a great dramatic premise. Sure, a teensy bit of gunplay would help the plot along but aside from that? Not needed. Keep it simple. Surely it writes itself?
Unfortunately not as Scott’s penchant for action keeps getting in the way. At first it’s just a minor annoyance. No matter how stylised you make your shots and how many jump cuts you use, standing on a train platform is never going to look sexy and the New York skyline is never improved by visually stuttering camera effects which can be replicated by, say, blinking a lot. Said annoyance grows during a police car sequence where the escort riders appear to have been hired from a circus stunt show and then finally turns into exasperation during the film’s climax, as Washington’s everyman rail clerk turns action hero. Replete with orange road safety vest.
If the above sounds stupid then you’re right – it is. Frustrating too, as Washington seems perfectly cast as the humble family man thrust into events beyond his control whilst Travolta is always dependable when it comes to playing the twisted, maniacal megalomaniac roles that have come his way in recent years. Yet, like the plot, Scott just never seems to get the best out of them and so their performances, whilst adequate, are never really engaging or believable, characters full of potential that’s never explored. In many ways giving ‘Pelham 123’ to Tony Scott is like giving the finest selection of Alaskan Sea cod and the sweetest French pomme de terres to your local Harvester chef. However fine the ingredients, they’ll end up as fish and chips because that’s all the chef knows. Filling certainly, but a waste of potential.
So there you have it. ‘The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3’ has immense potential but ends up as just another second-rate heist film. Watchable enough but capable of so much more.
"Funny Games U.S." is a shot-for-shot remake of Michael Haneke’s previous "Funny Games". In the 1997 Austrian version the main characters were interpreted by nationally-attested actors who were acquainted with the already polemic film-maker (some of them were involved in "Benny’s Video"). Eleven years and a few awards later, the experienced and certified director decided to cross the Atlantic and allocated the leading roles to two world-famous actors, namely Naomi Watts ("Mulholland Drive", "21 Grams", "King Kong") and Tim Roth ("Reservoir Dogs", "Pulp Fiction", "Little Odessa").
Retrospectively, one could consider that the opening scene sets the tone: a calming piece of classical music accompanies a beautiful tracking. The couple and its child are serenely and safely brought together in their car when, suddenly, a brutal track of death metal bursts the bubble. The continuation is easy to sum up: they are going to be hold by two young men behaving in an extremely “strange” manner and playing at wicked and obscene games…
In my opinion this movie is a great one because the plot is simplistic but cleverly unwound. Indeed showing and dealing with violence is common in cinema but Michael Haneke succeeds in involving and hitting the audience. Classic on the whole, his scenario can sometimes be riling or sometimes amazing. Dwelling at length on scenes apparently lacking in action, he actually pushes the tension at its climax – possibly losing the most impatient and the most sensitive ones. His force is not to sink into the violence race, the pursuit of the most gory picture in which many “hurried” horror movies fall. On the contrary the violence he brings out is neither explicit nor free, it is rather psychological and considered.
Finally I think the purely cinematic performance covers a sharp critique of the drifts of our society. Others can argue that he only formulates a personal – and radically pessimistic – vision of humankind, or else that he aims at revealing the great power of our mind in terms of torture. At all events everyone is forced to recognize the great efficiency of his work: raw and gloomy, "Funny Games U.S." is trying and oppressive. Uninformed or accustomed, the viewer is inevitably shaken up by this experience (yet two conditions are required: first to give up entertainment and then to accept to play the game). In this vein it is a brilliant movie that cannot be ignored by the cinema lover. And those who would ask for more can refer to Michael Haneke’s filmography (notably to "The Piano Teacher").
The movie "Sherlock Holmes," which characters originally come from the famous books about Sherlock Holmes and his friend Watson, is an 128 minutes thrilling experience. Without having read the books it's still possible to enjoy the film, since the producers have used their artistic licence to spice the characters up a bit.
Robert Downey Jr. alias "Sherlock Holmes" and Jude Law alias "Dr. Watson" do a great performance as the maincharacters and they are capable of lifting the movie in times when the movie gets a little long-winded.
It all ends with the classic the-dectetive-reveals-it-all, but since it's difficult to figure out what has really happened you will still find yourself a little bit suprised at the end. The only lack this film has is its missing twist since it's pretty much possible to predict how the plot will unfold itself the last hour. But all in all it's a very good movie definitely worth watching especially if you are into the detective-genre.
Three well-to-do Edinburgh flatmates acquire a suitcase full of cash when their mysterious new lodger is found dead. Conspiring to dispose of the body, the trio soon become suspicious of one another and their distrust ultimately proves their undoing...
This Britpop thriller is, for some inexplicable reason, one of my mother's favourite films, which I think speaks volumes about my home life.
Returning to Danny Boyle's 1994 debut after some time, I was somewhat disappointed by its tricksy editing, smarmy humour and unappealingly arrogant protagonists. Ewan McGregor's subsequent ubiquity means that it doesn't take long for his chirpy Highland charm to wear thin and become an annoyance. However, the film has barely dated and is still an intense, taut suspense piece, much more claustrophobic than, say, Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan (1998) for being largely contained within one apartment. Some motifs here would be echoed in Boyle's next outing, the mega-hit, epoch-defining Irvine Welsh adaptation Trainspotting (1996), such as the pounding techno theme by Leftfield and the clockwork baby seen crawling across the floorboards. Boyle may not have been Britain's answer to Quentin Tarantino, as he was hailed in 1994, but he did finally cement his place in the international mainstream with the multi-Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire in 2008.
I think the real reason to see Shallow Grave again is for Christopher Eccleston's utterly terrifying performance as David, the accountant who takes to living in the loft, unable to cope with reality after dismembering Keith Allen's corpse. Look out for Ken Stott as a quirky detective with writer John Hodge at his side and actor/director Peter Mullan playing one of the grimey hoods seeking to reclaim the money (the total value of which is never disclosed, incidentally).
The story, about a friendship gradually eroded by greed, may be one of the oldest in the world and go back on screen to at least The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948) but it's still a damn good one.
