Mystic River (2003)

Director Clint Eastwood's Best Picture Oscar-nominated Mystic River is simply a Boston-set police procedural, really, which makes all the solemnity, all the anguish of the story - all the blue-grey bleakness - and the fact an investigation that takes a matter of days to resolve is couched in twenty-five years of trauma context, a bit much - certainly once the movie ends and you know who killed Katie Markum, the daughter of ex-convict Jimmy Markum (a Best Actor Oscar-winning performance from Sean Penn) the question will have crossed your mind why so much trouble was taken to tell what is essentially a coincidence-heavy episode of Law and Order.

★★★☆☆

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Leave The World Behind (2023)

A family's vacation is interrupted when the man who owns their holiday rental shows up with his daughter in the middle of the night and asks to stay, the set-up of this very M. Night Shyamalan-style slow-burn thriller in which characters are cut-off from the world and from information and left with only their imaginations to grapple with a seemingly absurd new reality, and it is just a shame the solid and intriguing drama concludes with a distinctly American notion that zoning-out in front of the telly beats wrestling critically with world news.

★★★★☆

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Stir of Echoes (1999)

Released in the same year as The Sixth Sense, this paranormal thriller also has a cute-ish kid seeing dead people, but the focus of the plot is on Dad, following a more Amityville Horror-type of same-old trajectory in which the 'he' (Kevin Bacon) becomes increasingly erratic, subject to paranormality that renders him unable to maintain happy relationships with his wife and child - it's all very predictable but some effective sfx chills helps to overcome the stock-standardness.

★★★☆☆

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Criminal Law (1988)

A defence lawyer (Gary Oldman), the impressive sort who places a glass before a jury and says the decision they have to make is "as clear as water", starts muddying things when he turns against a client he has just got off a murder charge, suddenly believing him to be a crazed killer that needs taking down from within their lawyer-client relationship, and how could he not come to this conclusion given the client (Kevin Bacon) is doing crazy eyes so hard he is cross-eyed (see poster) and has a perfectly plain-to-see serial killer's relationship with his mother, all crude, eyeroll-inducing plot details out of all balance with the movie's attempts at loftiness as the lawyer engages in heady Socratic dialogue about justice with an annoying law muse and at the same time engages in fiery revenge talk with an unlikely love interest.

★☆☆☆☆

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In The Cut (2003)

I love Meg Ryan as a non-comedic actress and I love Jane Campion's intelligent films, and I love Mark Ruffalo and mysteries and thrillers, which is why it pains me to say I don't very much love this ambitious Jane Campion mystery thriller starring a deadly serious Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo because while the movie is a clever feminist text with its message written into every line of dialogue and squeezed eloquently into the title and palpable in every scene (all of them, but consider for example Ryan and Ruffalo's first love scene which starts as a reenactment of an assault, or Ryan's self-conscious out-loud articulation of public transport poetry), In The Cut, about a serial killer who disarticulates women, doesn't work as a mystery thriller because everyone in the movie's claustrophobic circle of action is a disgusting misogynistic objectifier of women and long before the film ends it ceases to matter who among the lunatics - the really obvious culprit or one of the others on the periphery - is the killer, and unfortunately endscenes set in what is an absurd symbolic dreamscape do a disservice to the strong feminist text AND the mystery thriller.

★★★☆☆

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Patriots Day (2016)

This moment-by-moment account of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing is a moving tribute to the city, its first responders and citizens injured or killed in the two explosions, and coming so soon after events, is naturally not a movie interested in turning the camera away from the victims and heroes to explore more deeply the genesis of the crime or the backgrounds, rationales or personalities of the perpertrators, their relationship to each other, with their families or to Islam.

★★★☆☆

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Friday the 13th (1980)

For a movie that spawned eleven sequels (and counting) plus numerous spin-offs like Freddie vs Jason, this 1980 slasher is fairly derivative with Camp Lake Crystal (the setting where a bunch of young adults kumbayah around a fire, have sex, and generally have great times before being mercilessly picked off one-by-very-grisly-one) now a slasher movie cliché and the climax, which eveeeeeentually comes, heavily influenced by twenty years of film since Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

★★★☆☆

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Footloose (1984)

A city kid rocks the foundations of a conservative town in America's Midwest by challenging its ban of rock music and dancing, in this 80s classic, a dull, ridiculous melodrama that is not so ridiculous if you believe claims it is based on real events in the township of Elmore City, Oklahoma, and not so dull if you try to find ways in which it is analogous to real situations like, say, the Australian Government's stance on same-sex marriage.

★★☆☆☆

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Hollow Man (2000)

The special effects are so good in this Paul Verhoeven scifi thriller, they still hold up today 16 years after the film's release and it's clear the time, trouble and money spent on them was at the cost of all else - the Jekyll-and-Hyde story of a mad scientist is essentially a comic book superhero tale without a superhero - inert, rudderless and with nowhere to go - and it has the diabolical invisible madman villain tipped over the deep end not by his brilliance but by a petty love triangle...all that sfx invisibility simply becomes the means he uses to exact his tired horror movie revenge.

★★☆☆☆

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X-men: First Class (2011)

This episode of the X-men franchise goes back to 1962 to explain Professor Xavier's love-hate relationship with Magneto (they used to be buddies) and calms down the fever-pitch energy attained over the course of the original three X-men movies while still delivering the themes and set-pieces expected of the series.

★★★★☆

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