The Housemaid (2025)

A plot synopsis of this "thriller" on Wikipedia would reveal the twists just as artfully and thrillingly as director Paul Feig's movie - an adaptation of the hit book by Freida McFadden and hark-back to the throwaway domestic thrillers of the 90s - a monotonous, personality-free drear with no redeemable characters and nothing to care about, and when I genuinely ask family and friends who profess to have loved it what exactly they liked, the answer is frequently Sydney Sweeney's boobs.

★★☆☆☆

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Heretic (2024)

What it is when it is all said and done is nothing new, but it disguises its routineness with some terrific tension, some really not very fair horror-fantasy illusions, surprises, and thriller moments (those silent exchanges of shock!) that keep you unable to see where the movie is going to go - two young Mormon missionaries fall into the web of a smiling, leering spider, an annoying, gabbing Hugh Grant playing a potential convert but religious scholar whose own ideas about religion may prove more resolute than the missionaries' own.

★★★☆☆

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عنکبوت مقدس ('Holy Spider') (2022)

This unflinching look at the serial murders of Saeed Hanaei, an Iranian family man who (at least after he was caught) claimed his murders of sixteen prostitutes were religiously motivated (but, let's face it, war trauma, mummy boyness, male entitlement, and psychopathy came first, right?) is extremely hard to watch but utterly compelling given its basis in truth, given its electric performance from Zahra Amin Ebrahimi as the deep undercover journalist who dared bring Saeed Hanaei down, and given its jaw-dropping final scenes in which director Ali Abbasi reveals just how far Iran's corrupt masculinity will go to perpetuate itself.

★★★★☆

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Island of Hell (aka 'Devil's Island', 'Gokumon-tou', 'Hell's Gate Island' (獄門島) (1977)

Ichikawa Kon's 1977 adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel is faithful to the book except in its final moments when whodunnit is revealed and it is whodidntdunnit in the book, a change which will rankle fans of the classic mystery featuring the recurring, dandruff-suffering, scruffy detective Kindaichi Kousuke; meanwhile, non-Japanese speakers also will be frustrated by breakneck cutting, which makes it hard to enjoy the movie's Japanese sets, costuming, and its plot while also keeping up with lightning-speed subtitles. 

★★★☆☆

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Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009)

When its master dies, leaving it to run free, a Japanese Akita called Hachi takes up residence at a train station, where everyone assumes it is showing extreme loyalty to its deceased master, but it's easy to cynically flip this otherwise pleasant story - based on the 1920s real-life dog, Hachiko - into a tale of animal neglect, seeing the dog's choice to squat at the station as the result of its having been turfed out by uncaring family, made to sit through rain, hail, or shine in the only place anybody will feed and pet him...sorry.

★★★☆☆

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Death At An Old Mansion (本陣殺人事件) (1975)

It seems strange to stay completely faithful to the plot of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel The Honjin Murders yet change the title so no one who has read the book can easily find this adaptation, but I suppose Death At An Old Mansion dispenses with the archaic and unhelpful concept of a honjin and provides a more atmospheric English title better suited to this 1975 adaptation's giallo stylings - in good part a horror movie, chilling at times, but also an effective telling of Yokomizo's classic Japanese locked room murder mystery inspired by Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room.

★★★★☆

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A Haunting In Venice (2023)

With his third Agatha Christie adaptation (the first being Murder On The Orient Express; the second, Death On The Nile) director, lead actor, and likely infatuated-starer-at-self-in-mirrors Kenneth Brannagh delivers another big glossy star vehicle (this one has Tina Fey, terrific as Poirot's mystery novelist friend Ariadne Oliver, and Michelle Yeoh appears) but he again mishandles the all-important mystery, this time transforming Halloween Party into a supernatural horror, forgetting that to solve a mystery Hercule Poirot needs clues, not just to simply float around a crumbly Venetian mansion in extreme close-up; in the end, Brannagh's Poirot looks ridiculous presenting grand revelations magically-gleaned from two clues: flowers and a ringing phone. 

★★★☆☆

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Housebound (2014)

A permanently scowling young woman is sentenced to house arrest at her mother's house, the cluttered multi-storeyed homestead of her childhood that her mum thinks may be haunted, in this really amusing horror comedy that entertains as well as it creeps-you-out, and it has elements of absurdly funny mystery, too.

★★★★☆

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The House That Jack Built (2018)

Grisly murder is not the spectacle it used to be and no matter how hard tryhard provocateur Lars von Trier tries to match, say, Twitter/X in its ability to parcel out sudden, unexpected visual depravity, injecting increasingly shocking crime into his rehash of Nymph()mania (that's what this simply is, a third chapter, like the director is stuck on an idea, with Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe replaced by Matt Dillon's Jack, and her sex swapped with his serial murder; the languorous voiceover remains), the net effect of this heavy-handed and really quite silly movie is inanity.

★★☆☆☆

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The Hawk (1993)

A few years after she starred as Jane Tennison in the original Prime Suspect mini-series, Helen Mirren starred in this not terribly interesting, nor very psychologically coherent, BBC flim playing an English housewife who starts to think her husband is The Hawk, a serial killer pecking women's insides out on rainy nights along the freeway.

House of Wax (2005)

There's some innovation in the endscenes as our heroes, feet sinking into stairs, run around a house literally made of (melting) wax but otherwise this is a mediocre teen slasher, just an episode of "Halloween" or "Friday the 13th" but with a backstory that tries to justify a patently ridiculous contrivance: the story takes place in a long-lost small American town made entirely of wax.

★★☆☆☆

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Heist (2001)

There's a gunfight near the end that has the actors barely bothering to point their guns in the right direction, a sign that the actors' care factor, like the audience's, has dwindled to nothing over the course of David Mamet's increasingly unlikely crime caper, which is a shame given the movie's arresting start that introduces, mid-caper, our gang of grifters headed by Gene Hackman's Joe Moore, the mastermind who, yes, needs to do one more job but this time accompanied by the inexperienced nephew (Sam Rockwell) of his fence (Danny DeVito).

★★☆☆☆

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Halloween Kills (2021)

A "kill" isn't over until the camera has come to rest on the blood pooling in the cavity left by, say, a fluorescent tube or a broken stairpost in this especially unedifying 2021 Halloween movie that starts up right where 2018's Halloween left off (Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode is being rushed to hospital believing herself to have killed Michael Myers for good) and ends some time later that same loooong Halloween night after the townfolk of Haddonfield form lynch mobs to hunt Michael Myers (still alive, afterall -- or, well, nevermind...) while Laurie literally does nothing - she gets up from her hospital bed just once, only to get straight back in again to spout some never-before-uttered dubious Michael Myers mythology and that's all.

.

★★☆☆☆

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House of Secrets (1936)

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

When the new owner of Hawk's End, a property bequeathed to him in a will, visits the ramshackled house for the first time, he is told by a gun-wielding man and a mysterious blonde to leave and never return, but he repetitively goes back, each time to be told again by the gun-wielding man and the mysterious blonde never to go back, while inbetween times, he and his gumshoe friend postulate explanations for this peculiar state of affairs including the theory the house harbours a three-fingered fugitive on the run, is home to a long-lost pirate treasure, has been set up as a base for a government conspiracy, houses a murderer or, even more ridiculously, that all of these things are true, revealed in the really very silly plot's final ten minutes.

★★★☆☆

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House of Games (1985)

A successful author of a book about compulsive behaviours, an austere psychiatrist played by Louise Crouse, heads into a gambling house one night to confront the heavies holding a debt over one of her patients, but "nothing is as it seems" in writer-director David Mamet's terrific thriller - well, except that seasoned thriller fans won't be surprised by anything that happens - but the deliberate acting and pace grip as the psychiatrist quickly becomes a keen student in the art of the long con.

★★★★☆

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Halloween II (2009)

I thought director Rob Zombie got away with his first Halloween remake, taking viewers inside the head of masked crazy Michael Myers and giving the killer a sympathetic backstory and rationale for his killing in his adult life, but this 2009 sequel confirms the director is trying too hard with his vision for the slasher series - in every scene, Zombie distracts with his communications direct to viewer that what he is doing is arthouse: messages are graffitied on every wall and unlikely posters appear in every room pronouncing cultural subversiveness (a victim of a serial killer has a poster celebrating Charles Manson on her bedroom wall, really?), and even Weird Al Yankovich turns up as Zombie attempts to culturally contextualise what is better suited as a cartoony slasher for teens...and the results are a ridiculous mess: viewers share in the killer's delusory thoughts and are privy to manifestations of his madness in the form of mother, dressed like Legolas, leading a white horse on their journey back to Haddonfield, all the while as a separate movie, a misguided comedy, is spliced in here and there featuring Malcolm McDowell's Doctor Loomis as a whiny fame-whore, suddenly not the Doctor Loomis of previous iterations, in a storyline unrelated to the whole nor relevant to the greater series.

★☆☆☆☆

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Halloween (2007)

John Carpenter opened his original 1978 movie with a single first-person-perspective shot that shows the young Michael Myers' passage around, into and through his family home, telling viewers in just four minutes as much as they are to learn across any of Carpenter's movies about the masked crazy and his motive for killing his older sister, but in this, director Rob Zombie's 2007 remake, that opening scene is extrapolated into a not uninteresting but probably unnecessary hour of backstory that thoroughly unmasks the masked killer; then, the movie becomes a faithful remake of the 1979 original with Malcolm McDowell effective in Donald Pleasence's role of Doctor Samuel Loomis, the psychiatrist who treats Michael Myers in a sanatorium, becomes close to him, and is the only one convinced, after his break out from the asylum, that Michael is heading back to Haddonfield, Illinois to wreak more destruction.

★★★☆☆

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The Big Picture (L'Homme qui voulait vivre sa vie) (2010)

This talented Mr Ripley played by an always rivetting Romain Duris isn't a sociopath - he's quite sympathetic - but there are signs, like his getting into a bath in a business suit, that suggest there is something wacky about him and that might help explain his ability to upheave his life and leave his kids behind after he kills his wife's lover, disposes of the body in distinctly The Talented Mr Ripley style, adopts his victim's identity and moves to Kotor to live and work as a photographer - all enthralling stuff but after this great start, nothing much else happens before an abrupt, meaningless ending that abandons matters, including a plot thread involving poor wasted Catherine Deneuve that a better film would have tied up.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween (1978)

John Carpenter preempts the first- and third-person perspective sandbox video games with his original Halloween, a 1978 movie in which the camera hangs back behind the residents of Haddonfield and follows them as they wander in and out of homes and up and down streets, like we are watching Carpenter's playthrough of Silent Hill, starting in the opening scene with Michael as a child in Halloween costume navigating a circuitous path into a home to start his long career of killing; then, fifteen years later, we follow Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie as she wanders around the township with student books in hand, friends in tow, unaware that murderous Michael, now 21, has escaped an asylum and is himself wandering around with a camera hanging just behind his shoulder - the net effect, not just dread for the minute all this peaceful ambling turns murderous and chaotic, is a sense by movie's end you have almost revealed the whole map of the township.

★★★☆☆

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Hue and Cry (1947)

In this first Ealing comedy, a mystery adventure set in post-war London and full of derringdo, a young ragamuffin is surprised one day to stumble into a panel come-to-life from his favourite newspaper detective comic strip, but this is not Walter Mitty fantasy: the would-be sleuth and his extensive network of 'Blood and Thunder Boys' make it their duty to investigate and foil what turns out to be a criminal mastermind's nefarious plot.  

★★★★☆

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