At its best, the thriller keeps you one step behind, engineering dread from information withheld rather than action shown. Hitchcock proved that with Psycho, and the tradition runs through Se7en's rain-soaked moral horror right up to the present day. See what put Macca on edge in the reviews below.
Rating: 3.5★
Where a classic noir like Pickup on South Street or The Third Man prowls the rain-slicked back streets, The Reckless Moment brings the genre home. Quite literally. Max Ophüls plants his camera not in some seedy waterfront dive or fog-wrapped European alley but in a comfortable suburban household,
Rating: 4.0★
There is a moment early in Sexy Beast where Gal Dove, retired safecracker, is dozing by his swimming pool in the Spanish sunshine, the very picture of a man who has successfully left his old life behind, and you think: this is going to be a pleasant little film about
Rating: 3.0★
Before Shaft is anything else, it is that theme. Isaac Hayes's wah-wah-drenched, Oscar-winning title track, playing over John Shaft striding through the streets of early-seventies New York, is one of the great movie openings in the history of cinema, so effortlessly cool that the
Rating: 3.5★
My wife suggested we watch Deliverance, partly on the strength of our shared soft spot for Burt Reynolds, and partly because it sits on a couple of the "greatest ever" lists I'm slowly working through. I was happy to oblige. The only snag was that I&
Rating: 3.5★
The question at the heart of Saint Maud is a wonderfully simple, unnerving one: is this young woman a saint in the making, or is she quietly losing her mind? That single ambiguity, held carefully and never cheaply resolved, is what makes Rose Glass's debut such a compulsive
Rating: 4.0★
Nobody has ever worn their Hitchcock influence quite as proudly, or as quite as well, as Brian De Palma, and Blow Out is one of the films that earns him the comparison outright. He is one of my favourite directors, full stop, so I came to this already predisposed to
Rating: 3.5★
There is a nice surprise waiting in the credits of Twisters, and it is the kind of surprise that makes you sit up a little straighter in your seat. This giant, deafening summer tornado movie was directed by Lee Isaac Chung, the man behind Minari, one of the most tender
Rating: 3.0★
There is a version of Higher Learning that could have been one of the defining American films of the nineties. You can feel it in the best scenes, straining to get out. That it does not quite manage it is genuinely frustrating, because John Singleton was, at his best, among
Rating: 3.5★
I came to The Maze Runner with my expectations set firmly to low. It sits on Letterboxd's "Top 250 Most Fans" list, which in my experience is often code for popular rather than good, and I had it filed away under interchangeable young-adult blockbuster, the
Rating: 3.5★
Some films you watch for greatness, and some you watch to see where it all began. Dead of Night sits firmly in the second camp, and there is absolutely no shame in that. This 1945 Ealing Studios production is one of the foundation stones of British horror, made by a
Rating: 2.5★
A cast this stacked has no business being this forgettable. That is the thought I kept returning to throughout James Ashcroft's The Whisper Man, adapted from Alex North's novel, which somehow assembles Robert De Niro, Michael Keaton, Michelle Monaghan, Owen Teague and Adam Scott, and then
Rating: 3.5★
Imagine Léon: The Professional with every last scrap of warmth surgically removed, and you are somewhere close to You Were Never Really Here. Both films pair a haunted hired killer with a young girl he is trying to save, but where Léon finds an unlikely tenderness in that bond, Lynne
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