Dead of Winter (2025)

I'm sure the first two encounters the widow (Emma Thompson) has with the crims in this snowbound thriller are shown out-of-order - as it is, the first encounter is redundant, and the second, in light of the first, is, on the part of the crims, idiotic - and this continuity problem hangs over the first hour, calling into doubt all of the zigzagging the players do back and forth and back and forth between a cabin in the woods and an icy lake, but eventually, the action crescendos to something that allows you to surrender your reservations, and it is nice to see these Harry Brown-style thrillers in which an older person violently takes down deserving crims.

★★★☆☆

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Jack Frost (1998)

Probably not called "Frosty the Snowman" because of a copyright, Jack Frost, this peculiar, only very loosely Christmassy family fantasy made for only the most unquestioning of young audiences, never clearly articulates the rules around coming back to life as a snowman, but given his limited ability to move, tendency to melt, and never explained reluctance to be seen by anyone but his son, Michael Keaton's Jack Frost, a musician brought back to life as a snowman by a harmonica - don't ask questions - probably should have just opted to come back as a ghost like Patrick Swayze.

★★☆☆☆

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D-Tox (aka 'eye see you') (2002)

Cops in a snowed-in detox facility are being picked off one-by-bloody-one in this movie, more mindless slasher than intelligent whodunnit despite the classic Agatha Christie set-up, with Sylvester Stallone playing a cop undergoing treatment for trauma after his own wife fell victim to an eye-poking serial drill killer with a ridiculous sprawling, poorly defined modus operandi, naturally still on the loose.

★☆☆☆☆

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Whiteout (2009)

In an Antarctic research station beset by a killer, one character says of the Aurora Australis, "It's a helluva show," and the line comes right at the point viewers' can unequivocally agree the same cannot be said of this thriller full of performances icier and more remote than its polar setting. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Arctic (2018)

Imagine the Robert Redford character in All Is Lost on a sled, not a yacht, travelling across expanses of snow, not ocean, and having encounters with polar bears, not sharks, in a more contrived survival struggle - this movie compounds disaster upon disaster in an unlikely and ultimately unnecessary way - and you've got this beautiful-looking, extremely well-acted but very familiar man-versus-nature thriller starring Mads Mikkelsen.

★★★☆☆

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