Thriller
Film Review – Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Wake Up Dead Man (2025) continues the series of Benoit Blanc mystery thrillers headed by writer/director Rian Johnson. And just like the previous two entries – Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022) – Johnson infuses his whodunit with sharp writing, colorful characters, an engaging plot, and insightful social commentary. Even…
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Film Review – Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
***Warning: This Review Contains Spoilers*** The idea of Quentin Tarantino combining his Kill Bill saga into one complete work felt something of a distant rumor. It existed – at least for me – on the same level as a Vega Brothers spinoff or a potential Bond film. Soon after Vol.…
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Film Review – Ballad of a Small Player
One of the defining traits of noir is desperation. Characters are pushed to the brink – whether to escape danger, gain power, gain respect, gain love, or to fill a hole inside of themselves. They get pushed into a corner, to the point that they…
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Film Review – A House of Dynamite
***Warning: This Review Contains Spoilers*** Kathryn Bigelow – the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) – has returned with another political thriller, A House of Dynamite (2025). Along with writer Noah Oppenheim, Bigelow imagines a scenario in which a nuclear missile has been launched at…
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Film Review – The Lost Bus
Writer/director Paul Greengrass’s brand of documentary-like thrillers is on full display in The Lost Bus (2025). Just as he has done in other works about disasters and tragedies – such as United 93 (2006), 22 July (2018) and Captain Phillips (2013) – Greengrass explores the details of a harrowing event while trying to mine…
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Film Review – One Battle After Another
Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025) is a work that feels like a departure from the rest of his career, yet it contains all the quirks, eccentricities, and emotions that have long been associated with him. “PTA” has a reputation for bringing us into worlds…
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Film Review – The Long Walk
The open road has always stood as a metaphor for life. For as long as storytelling has been around, the road has represented possibility, leaving the past, facing the future, living in the moment, etc. It’s a tried-and-true narrative device that has been revisited over…
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Film Review – Eden
The title of Eden (2024) is a not so subtle reference to the biblical “Garden of Eden.” It was a supposed paradise, but through greed and corruption, man was banished from it never to return. It doesn’t take a genius to see the parallels here,…
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