Before and After (1996)

When their teenage son is suspected of murder, Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, as the boy's parents, must grapple with small-town police friends, lawyers, vigilantes, and their own feelings of culpability over covering up the crime, in Barbet Schroeder's earnest but a touch too pat adaptation of Rosellen Brown's book.

★★★☆☆

CIMECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Murder By Numbers (2002)

Hitchcock's Rope, based on a play, was a chamber thriller focused with icy precision on its chilling pair of Leopold-and-Loeb intellectual killers, whereas Barbet Schroeder's Murder By Numbers might be its dopey cousin 'Fray': it starts strong, in a Hitchcockian world that extends out the window to the horizon - more Rear Window than Rope - but descends into mess as its two killers (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) turn on each other, with the film asking us to care about too many extraneous things - the cop's sex life, her traumatic past, one killer's love interest, and even a monkey - until the murdering pair, in the end plodding here and there in plastic body suits and swim goggles, look less icy and more and more like the bungling burglars from Home Alone.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Single White Female (1992)

This in many ways unremarkable b-movie about a roommate who gradually takes over an apartment owner's life, adopting her fashion tastes and hairstyle, insinuating herself into her relationships and eventually tipping over the edge and going plain batshit crazy, unexpectedly resonated with audiences in 1992 and became a huge success - probably due in good part to the performance of its star: the inner city New York apartment in The Ansonia building that everybody wishes they could one day own, psycho roomie or not.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW