The filmmaking duo behind Haunt (2019), Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, pivot from horror to sci-fi/fantasy in their latest flick, 65. The film brings a futuristic edge and a time travel plot to the prehistoric period, pitting Adam Driver against dinosaurs in a lightly tense family-focused race-against-the clock thriller. It’s nothing new or particularly exciting, but it’s enjoyable enough dumb-fun.
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After receiving an Oscar nomination for his screenplay collaboration on Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person In The World, Eskil Vogt returns with the grounded and gripping supernatural thriller, The Innocents. With steady hands and clear-eyed focus, the film thoughtfully examines the dark fascinations and curiosities of children to surprising and effective ends. One thing’s for sure: the magic of childhood has never been this compelling or terrifying.
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John Krasinski returns to the helm of the Quiet Place franchise, writing, directing, producing, and starring (briefly) in this surprisingly solid sequel. With Part II, Krasinski crafts a taut continuation to the Abbott family’s story that effectively captures the spirit of the original while building out its post-apocalyptic world.
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Those Who Wish Me Dead is the latest film from writer-turned-director Taylor Sheridan (who co-wrote the screenplay with Charles Leavitt and Michael Koryta). With a stale throwback vibe, this Angelina Jolie fronted thriller relies too heavily on tired clichés and easily slumps into the lower echelon of Sheridan’s filmography, ultimately lacking the tension, emotions, and character of his previous films.
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Director Timur Bekmambetov’s latest film, Profile, is an unconventional thriller with real-life roots. Based off the 2015 nonfiction bestseller In the Skin of a Jihadist by a French journalist under the pseudonym Anna Erelle, Bekmambetov pushes the Screenlife format he helped to pioneer (as a producer on Unfriended and Searching) into new terrain, one with more dimension and scarier consequences.
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We’ve got the early insight into writer/director Andrew Morgan’s feature debut, Long Gone By, which is set to premiere at HBO's New York Latino Film Festival on August 17, 2019 (more info here). Understated and emotionally raw, Long Gone By is an intimately unnerving portrait of a woman willing to sacrifice everything to give her daughter the chance at a life she never had.
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Everything in Paul Schrader's life has led him to this moment; all his time spent in the seminary, his adoration (brought on by his brief career in film criticism) for the directors Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Th. Dreyer, as well as his own prolific career as a screenwriter and filmmaker (particularly Taxi Driver and his solitary man films) culminate to a beautiful, albeit ominous head with his stunning modern masterpiece, First Reformed. The film is a thoroughly engrossing slow burn that gives you much to chew on, including its momentous final moments, and it has the potential to quite literally leave you shaken.
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Six years after the masterfully tense psychological thriller We Need To Talk About Kevin, Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay marks her return with You Were Never Really Here, an enigmatic slow burning neo-noir, based off the novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames. Ramsay, who is more concerned about the man behind the hit than it is the hit itself, delivers a wickedly dark character study veiled as an action film that still manages, despite its efforts to deny the gratification typically found in an action thriller, to be a unique, viscerally gripping cinematic experience that will hit you with the blunt force of a ball-pein hammer.
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