The Nest (2020)

The title, from the start, is a clever way to keep audiences guessing, hinting as it does at slimey masses of eggs of some sort of weird alien family, while the initial set-up is horror-home stuff - an entrepreneur moves his family from the US to London, into an old country manor a la Amityville Horror; halfway through, I stopped to google whether I was watching an adaptation of Agatha Christie's 'Endless Night', and along the way was reminded of 'Arbitrage', 'The Devil's Advocate', that awful 'Saltburn'...but this not knowing exactly what you are getting with 'The Nest' is what keeps the exceptionally well-acted, handsomely produced Canadian thriller razorwire sharp, taut.

★★★★☆

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The Human Trap (aka The Trap) (2021)

The synopsis of this 2021 South Korean 88-minute mere slip of a movie - teenagers go camping and end up terrorised in the woods - will drive away most non-slasher fans, and that is a small shame because while the events undoubtedly grow grisly by the end, the story preceding that is a punchy, reasonably restrained and intelligent one - a thriller with twists and turns not so hard to predict but doled out quick enough to maintain interest, at least in my case - for eighty-eight minutes of a nine-hour flight.

★★★☆☆

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My Salinger Year (aka 'My New York Year') (2020)

In this uneven The Devil Wears Prada set in the publishing, not the fashion, industry of the 1990s, wannabe writer Joanna Ratkoff (a real person upon whose experiences her book - and then this adapatation - are based) scores a dream entry-level job at the Harold Orr publishing agency in New York, which is the agency that really did count notoriously reclusive writer J D Salinger among its author-clients, and it is there that Ratkoff develops a working relationship with Salinger while labouring under Sigourney Weaver's Phyllis Westberg, not a savage Anna Wintour powerhouse but a more falliable Luddite whose wariness towards the office's first computer provides good humour throughout the movie.

★★★☆☆

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The Father (2020)

This multi-Oscar-Award-winning film is no-one's idea of a good time but it is so rivetting on account of its being so well-acted and filmed and told, you are not able to take your eyes off it and the sting in the tail of course is that while delivered with thrills of a distinctly Hitchcockian style, these thriller elements are just the trappings of a very real, commonplace, and oh-so-heart-breaking aged-care conundrum and the film cleverly makes you guilty of assuming wrong things about the cantankerous old man Anthony Hopkins plays.

★★★★☆

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The People Upstairs (Spanish: "Sentimental")

With the exception of Javier Cámara's character, so sarcastic and annoying he almost bursts the whole, this comedy drama is a light and frothy bubble, a surprise given the subject matter could so easily have been treated as salacious, about a get-together between neighbouring couples with the couple from upstairs proving so disarmingly open, the downstairs couple are forced to face some truths.

★★★☆☆

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Fatale (2020)

The fact that at the start of the movie the married sports agent sleeps with a woman in Las Vegas - who turns out to be the lead investigator when he is attacked by a home invader - has no bearing at all on the runaway plot, which starts out all Fatal Attraction, drifts into Dial M For Murder, squeezes in a convoluted Strangers On A Train finale, and as if all that weren't already far too much for what is really just a throwaway sleazy thriller of the Basic Instinct kind, finally embarrasses itself by dumping into the vapid mix some weighty messaging about the very real plight of Black men at the mercy of white American law enforcers.

★★☆☆☆

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Riders of Justice (Retfærdighedens Ryttere) (2020)

While the media and police dismiss a train crash as an accident, a statistician uses an algorithm to prove to the husband and daughter of a woman killed that nothing is random and in fact the crash was murder, in this unusual, genre-bending, Mads Mikkelsen-helmed Danish movie that blends life-affirming human drama with top-notch revenge action, philosophy, and absurdist comedy.

★★★★☆

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Appearances (Les Apparences) (2020)

I've never heard of the Swedish crime author Karin Alvtegena but here one of her books, Betrayal, is adapted for the screen and it is a mostly compelling psychological drama (although one messily over-plotted with a crime hurried in at the end) with a terrific lead performance by Karin Viard as the wife of an orchestra conductor, who 'keeps up appearances' after she discovers her husband has betrayed her. 

★★★☆☆

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The Night Clerk (2016)

I think we are supposed to be relieved when the 'Norman Bates' secret of a hotel night clerk with Asbergers is out and turns out to be not quite what we suspected because this thriller seems to think that that is the end of the matter and moves breezily on, apparently unaware of a whole lot of concerns and questions and 'but-hold-on-a-minutes' the viewer has about this witness to a hotel room murder who becomes embroiled in an investigation; it's an initially intriguing but ultimately ŕather sad little thriller.

★★☆☆☆

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A Quiet Place II (2020)

The start takes audiences back to "Day One" when the extremely sound-sensitive creatures first land on Earth, an arresting sequence that has debut director John Krasinski demonstrating Shyamalan-at-his-best flourishes, but long before the audience is satisfied with this backstory and before any point to it is established, the movie abruptly gives way to three concurrent story threads in the present, post-the original movie, in which three different characters simply walk heel-to-toe on three different sand tracks to three different destinations, hardly enthralling and full of directorial looseness, with the alien threat along these boring paths not much more worrying than if, say, you were hiking in an area inhabited by wild dogs (but wild dogs that, although certain to appear at each significant landmark, only turn up in ones or twos, never more, irrespective of how much noise you make).

★★☆☆☆

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Bad Boys for Life (2020)

The machismo of the earlier movies didn't appeal to me so I haven't seen them, and I suspect a fondness for the two buddy cops, Will Smith's Detective Mike Lowrey and Martin Lawrence's Detective Marcus Burnett, is necessary to care less about their antics in this third action movie of the series, one that features numerous return characters I didn't know and adds new details to the detectives' backstories that are meant to be surprising but are not surprising if, like me, you don't know any different.

★★☆☆☆

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Brahms: The Boy II (2020)

Viewers of the original movie, The Boy, in 2016 were either dismayed by the ending which undid the classic "creepy doll" horror they thought they were watching or like me thought the ending clever - a way to freshen up a stale old "creepy doll" b-horror movie - and now, this sequel, presumably hoping that that dismayed half of viewers might be able to be coaxed back and get behind another creepy doll franchise, creates a backstory that serves to revert to a mere creepy doll horror the events of the original film, with Katie Holmes, as concerned mom watching her son develop far too strong a bond with a doll, valiantly trying to disguise the movie's staggering lack of originality, its utter hohum-ness.

★☆☆☆☆

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Run (2020)

I watched this as a double-billing with The Woman In The Window, both Netflix thrillers featuring women confined to their homes, but Run is the better film - a fun thriller and great example of Grand Dame Guignol horror with Sarah Paulson (in the role Bette Davis would have taken back in the day) playing a mum whose management of her wheelchair-bound daughter's life and medications and time might not be as altruistic as everyone in town - the pharmacist, the postie, the group therapy attendees - might think.

★★★★☆

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Unhinged (2020)

An opening scene of shocking brutality sets the unchanging tone of this - what? - neither a horror movie nor a thriller, perhaps it's a rage movie: an unedifying long-note of misery and brutality, about a road rage incident that goes on for about an hour after a deeply uninteresting opening twenty-five minutes in which the filmmakers pretend it is important to care about their meat-sack characters.

★☆☆☆☆

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Follow Me (2020)

To mark the tenth anniversary of his online success, a Logan Paul type of vlogger (read "young, irresponsible and annoying") heads to Moscow with friends to participate in a livestreamed "escape room" only to realise too late into the puzzle-solving experience that the racially-stereotyped Russian heavies in charge of the venue have watched and want to reenact Eli Roth's Hostel - their wanton bloodshed stays mostly offscreen, thankfully, but the film doesn't do a very good job of hiding the reason why.

★☆☆☆☆

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Tenet (2020)

It is basically a James Bond movie - an icy-cool, broody Daniel Craig one - but instead of a nuclear code or a diamond-powered laser or nude bomb, John David Washington's agent is pursuing a villain armed with a travel-backwards-through-time machine, meaning it's a Bond film loaded with mind-bending scenes in which some characters move forward and others backward through time, but just relax, remind yourself it's just an action film, and try to enjoy the nonsense...with subtitles on (it's incomprehensible otherwise) and while ignoring the second half's frequent clunking exposition and unsuccessful attempts at injecting emotion into the high-concept action.

★★★☆☆

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The Heist of the Century (El Robo Del Siglo) (2020)

I tend not to like heist films - I lack patience with the set-up knowing the meticulous planning comes undone the second the plan is enacted and I never manage to care much for the crims (so what if everything goes belly up and they get caught?) - but this comedy thriller from Argentina is a rollicking good time, a heist film full of characters you can care about, based on the incredible true story of the 2006 robbery of the Banco Rio in Acassuso, Buenos Aires dubbed by media outlets at the time "The Heist of the Century", a crime staggering in its complexity and ingenuity and one that had the peculiar effect, only in Argentina, of turning the criminals into folk heroes including mastermind Fernando Araujo who wrote the source book and co-wrote this film's screenplay. 

★★★★☆

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The Woman In The Window (2020)

The plot of A J Finn's book was tailored for fans of the classic film thrillers of the 30s and 40s and 50s — essentially a string of all the especially twisty-turny bits of Hitchcock's The Lady Vamishes and Rear Window mixed with the memorable moments of other noir thrillers like Witness To Murder — but what the book lacks and what this adaptation dutifully lacks is any masterful thriller storytelling: there is no clever pacing or building of suspense or deft shifts in tone, just a relentless, frenetically paced string of twists and, like the book, the movie is filled not with characters but mere shapes who all speak with A J Finn's voice and dart around with the same urgency and at the same speed, driving the story to its end before you've even started to distinguish between these blobs.

★★☆☆☆

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Enola Holmes (2020)

The sister of the famous Baker Street detective, a character dreamt up by author Nancy Springer for a series of teen detective novels, is brought up outside the conventions of turn-of-the-century Britain and so as a young adult is perfectly equipped with the sass, street-smarts and probing scientific mind needed to solve a mystery - her mother disappears and a Marquess disappears and our hero, Enola, embarks on a rollicking, satisfying (well, mostly...not including the underdeveloped plot thread regarding Helena Bonham Carter's character) adventure through a London on the cusp of a sweeping social change.

★★★★☆

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Nomadland (2020)

The underpaid and overworked man I'm friendly with in my supermarket didn't recognise the name of this movie when I told him it was the reason why I was passing through on the way home so much later than usual, so I told him, "A woman lives in a van and drives around America," and joked that that was everything, he didn't need to see it, he knew everything, but of course there is so much more to Nomadland than that: it is a poem, really, full of breathtaking moments, about the humans who out of necessity pare life down to its most simple form and push, drive on, and somehow manage to still find great beauty in things - say, broken eggshells - even when all else around them is broken.

★★★★☆

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