She Rides Shotgun sports a passionate performance from Taron Egerton as a desperate man on the run. It also features John Carroll Lynch – one of the most reliable character actors around – digging into the role of a crooked sheriff carrying a very nasty streak.
But it’s the nine year-old girl you’ll be talking about long after the movie ends.
Ana Sophia Heger delivers one of the most impressive child performances in years as Polly, a young girl who hesitantly gets in the car with her dangerous father Nate (Egerton) when her mother doesn’t show after school.
You can probably guess why Mom is late, and Polly could be next unless Daddy and daughter make a blood-soaked road trip through the Southwest toward a chance at settling old scores.
Director and co-writer Nick Rowland adapts Jordan Harper’s source novel, a story that shares the roots of generational violence that propelled Rowland’s brooding and excellent 2019 feature, Calm With Horses. And while that film was deeply and unmistakably Irish, this time Rowland crafts some sharp edges from the tragically familiar American meth epidemic.
Egerton is intense, taut and terrific as a father with one last shot at redemption, while Lynch, as the sadistic “God of Slabtown,” mines tension and terror through a measured commitment to brutality. This is just the latest version of a tale that’s been told in countless crime thrillers, but Rowland works levels of camerawork, pace and performance that give familiar themes relevant life.
Heger (Things Seen and Heard, TV’s Life in Pieces) simply amazes, displaying a wonderfully authentic chemistry with Egerton that shines from their very first moments together. And though it’s hard to know in what order the scenes were shot, you start to wonder if Rowland began pushing Heger once he realized just what he had in the little powerhouse.
The violence, tension and dramatic intensity get heavier, and this girl does not shrink from it at all. Far from it. Rowland trusts her enough to deliver his parting shot via a gradual, extended close up that will leave you astonished at Heger’s level of emotion and control.
It’s a gripping reminder that one young actor has a seemingly boundless future, and that She Rides Shotgun conjures an effective remedy for some old wounds.
About an hour into The Home, things escalate. And quickly. There’s a big enough jolt of blood and violence to make you hopeful the foolishness that’s been rolled out so far can be rescued.
Sorry, too little, too late.
Pete Davidson gives the film a solid, sympathetic anchor as Max, a troubled man who gets sentenced to community service doing custodial work at a New Jersey old folks home. He makes friends with some of the residents, angers some of his co-workers, and quickly comes to realize something pretty f’ed up is going on.
Director and co-writer James DeMonaco, who created The Purge franchise and helmed three of the chapters, can’t mine the same levels of socially-conscious horror or reality-based tension. What’s up with these seniors is ridiculous sci-fi horror built on ideas from much better films, with a message that’s hammered home through repetition, explanation and – for the first 60 minutes at least – boredom.
Through it all, Davidson exhibits a fine screen presence, and the supporting cast is littered with veteran faces you’ll recognize even if the names (John Glover, Ethan Phillips, Bruce Altman) aren’t familiar. They help you to keep rooting for the movie when the bloodshed hits, but DeMonaco doesn’t see it through, pulling up too soon and settling for a curious finale that’s far too weak to satisfy.
A horror film out to chop bloody holes in that “Greatest Generation” mantra is plenty intriguing. The Home, though, feels stuck between more desirable neighborhoods. It’s not self-aware or over-the-top enough to be satirical fun, but far too obvious for metaphorical nuance.
So we’re left wanting, reminded of how important it is to craft a good plan for the golden years.
One of my favorite classic album deep cuts is Springsteen’s “Meeting Across the River” from Born to Run. In the song, two longtime losers are planning for the night they’ve been waiting for, when they’ll finally get a chance at the big score that will change their lives.
Bruce leaves the ending up to us, because the point is more about the past of these characters than their future.
To a Land Unknown works on similar levels, as director/co-writer Mahdi Fleifel uses an intimate story to invite us into larger conversations.
Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) are Palestinian cousins living in Greece. Chantila has a wife and child in Lebanon, while Reda is trying to make it past thirty days off drugs. Together, the two snatch purses and scheme for any way to get enough money for fake passports.
Unexpected friendships with a 13 year-old from Gaza (Mohammed Asurafa) and a local cougar (The Lobster‘s Angeliki Papoulia) give Chatila an idea for a big con. Pull it off, and they’ll have enough for the passports and tickets to a new life in Germany.
Once there, they will open a cafe, reunite the family and finally breathe easier.
After many years of short films and documentaries, Fleifel’s first narrative feature leans on many recognizable influences and familiar moments in movie history. The solid performances and assured plotting keep you engaged throughout, but as the film progresses, Fleifel brings weight to an undercurrent of exile that breathes in humanity, empathy and undeniable relevance.
Like so many other lost souls in songs and stories, Chatila and Reda are desperate for a place to belong, and for the chance to build their own lives. To a Land Unknown brings a cold and urgent realism to that familiar journey.
The idea of a changeling—a baby that’s not really yours, and who knows where your dear sweet little one really is?!—is so primal a fear that it’s existed in folktales for centuries. Ireland really picks this scab well in their horror movies, but they are not alone. It’s an idea that can’t help but unsettle. Here are our five favorite “that’s not your baby!” horror movies.
5. The Baby (1973)
Lord above, here’s a weird one.
Director Ted Post (Hang ’em High, Magnum Force) gets a little unseemly with this story of welfare fraud, Greek tragedy, fear of emasculation, and more. Freud would have a time with The Baby!
Mrs. Wadsworth (Ruth Roman) does not want nosey new social services wench Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) sniffing around. Why does she and her two perfectly normal, not at all criminal, grown daughters have to prove that their fully grown son/brother still thinks he’s a baby? The grown man in the crib and onesie upstairs.
If that’s not upsetting enough, Ann Gentry’s not all she’s cracked up to be, either. What was the deal with the Seventies?
4. The Hallow (2015)
Visual showman Corin Hardy has a bit of trickery up his sleeve. His directorial debut The Hallow, for all its superficiality and its recycled horror tropes, offers a tightly wound bit of terror in the ancient Irish wood.
Adam (Joseph Mawle) and Clare Hitchens (Bojana Novakovic) move, infant Finn in tow, from London to the isolated woods of Ireland so Adam can study a tract of forest the government hopes to sell off to privatization. But the woods don’t take kindly to the encroachment and the interloper Hitchens will pay dearly.
Hardy has a real knack for visual storytelling. His inky forests are both suffocating and isolating, with a darkness that seeps into every space. He’s created an atmosphere of malevolence, but the film does not rely on atmosphere alone.
Though all the cliché elements are there – a young couple relocates to an isolated wood to be warned off by angry locals with tales of boogeymen – the curve balls Hardy throws will keep you unnerved and guessing.
3. Hole in the Ground (2019)
Sara (Seána Kerslake), along with her bib overalls and young son Chris (James Quinn Markey), are finding it a little tough to settle into their new home in a very rural town. Chris misses his dad. Sara is having some life-at-the-crossroads anxiety.
Then a creepy neighbor, a massive sink hole (looks a bit like the sarlacc pit) and Ireland’s incredibly creepy folk music get inside her head and things really fall apart.
Writer/director Lee Cronin’s subtext never threatens his story, but instead informs the dread and guilt that pervade every scene. You look at your child one day and don’t recognize him or her. It’s a natural internal tension and a scab horror movies like to pick. Kids go through phases, your anxiety is reflected in their behavior, and suddenly you don’t really like what you see. You miss the cuter, littler version. Or in this case, you fear that inside your beautiful, sweet son lurks the same abusive monster as his father.
2. Border (2018)
Sometimes knowing yourself means embracing the beast within. Sometimes it means making peace with the beast without. For Tina—well, let’s just say Tina’s got a lot going on right now.
Border director/co-writer Ali Abbasi has more in mind than your typical Ugly Duckling tale, though. He mines John Ajvide Lindqvist’s (Let the Right One In) short story of outsider love and Nordic folklore for ideas of radicalization, empowerment, gender fluidity and feminine rage.
It would hardly feel like a horror movie at all were it not for that whole, horrifying baby thing.
The result is a film quite unlike anything else, one offering layer upon provocative, messy layer and Abbasi feels no compulsion to tidy up. Instead, he leaves you with a lot to think through thanks to one unyieldingly original film.
1. Lamb (2021)
Among the many remarkable elements buoying the horror fable Lamb is filmmaker ValdimarJóhannsson’s ability to tell a complete and riveting tale without a single word of exposition.
Not one. So, pay attention.
Rather than devoting dialog to explaining to us what it is we are seeing, Jóhannsson relies on impressive visual storytelling instincts, answering questions as they come up with a gravesite, a crib coming out of storage, a glance, a bleat.
His cast of three – well, four, I guess — sells the fairy tale. A childless couple working a sheep farm in Iceland find an unusual newborn lamb and take her in as their own child. As is always the way in old school fables, though, there is much magical happiness but a dire recompense soon to come.
James Gunn’s brand of humor is so sincere—never snarky, never brooding and mysterious—that he seemed a good fit for Superman, the most sincere of all the superheroes. Still, we were skeptical. Can something as wholesome as Superman be relevant in a time more rife with corruption and swampy with cynicism than any in modern history? And he has a dog?!
Yes, it turns out Superman (David Corenswet) and Gunn’s brand of sincerity is exactly what we need in the face of all this ugliness. And honest to God, by Act 3, we even loved Crypto the dog.
Gunn ‘s script wisely skips the origin story, quickly catching us up via onscreen text and dropping us in the snow with a superhero already battling his toughest opponent. That foe may look like a supervillain, but really Superman’s enemy is every human being’s enemy: greed.
Carving out yet another fine performance in a career littered with them, Nicholas Hoult delivers a searing, self-aware turn as Lex Luthor, the billionaire tech blowhard and would-be king. Though the character is clearly patterned after some real-life supervillainy, Hoult’s performance is all the more unnerving for its believability. And even when Gunn saddles him with some overwritten speeches, Hoult’s talent elevates the moment beyond cartoon theatrics.
Corenswet is a delightfully earnest Big Blue, offset nicely by a more cynical and wonderfully physical Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and a trio of metahuman helpers, the Justice Gang: Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Cleveland’s own Isabela Merced), and Mr. Terrific (a scene stealing Edi Gathegi and his statement-making jacket).
Act 1 takes a little while to find its groove, but the slow start is easy to forget once the story elements begin to gel. The social commentary is in your face, pointed and matter-of-fact relatable, but doesn’t sink to preachiness or finger wagging. And while it is consistently funny, the film never makes humor as much of a focus as Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy series, opting instead for smaller, more organic asides.
Of course, there’s an added bonus for those of us here in Ohio, as Cleveland makes a pretty spectacular Metropolis, even when it’s taking a beating. Filming specifically for IMAX, Gunn and cinematographer Henry Braham make the upgrade a worthy and welcome piece of the immersive world-building.
The biggest weakness here – other than kryptonite – is Gunn’s comfort with some unnatural dialog and overly detailed speeches of exposition. And ironically, it’s the level of entertainment that surrounds these moments that causes them to land as unnecessary and curious.
But more often than not, Gunn’s storytelling choices pay off. We know the character pretty well by now, but this Superman/Clark Kent is unlike any we’ve seen before. Gunn and Corenswet make him more vulnerable and more human than ever, sometimes doubting himself but never doubting his mission to do good.
Remember the hero’s motto of “truth, justice and the American way?” Superman does. And even though those words are never spoken, the film finds a cinematic joy in reminding us how those ideals can be twisted until they’re barely recognizable.
Lord knows humanity needs a win right now. Thanks to a man and his dog, we get one.
You may have heard Jaws celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last month. The celebrations and remembrances, the memes and mementos have been joyous fun, reminding us of a landmark film that changed the landscape of the movies.
And now, like the fashionably late party guest everyone was waiting for, comes Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story. Streaming concurrently on Hulu, Disney + and the National Geographic channel, the film serves up a boatload of BTS goodness that fans will wish was twice as big as the 88-minute running time.
At the heart of director Laurent Bouzereau’s deep dive is the time spent with director Steven Spielberg. His approach to adapting the book for the screen, his tales of how the shoot went months behind schedule, how there was real doubt that it could even be completed, and the PTSD that followed him into his filmmaking future are all completely captivating. Looking back, he still seems amazed that they pulled it off, and Bouzereau finds an effective contrast between Spielberg remembering what went wrong and famous fans such as Quentin Tarantino, Jordan Peele, Guillermo del Toro, Steven Soderbergh and more lavishing praise about what went right.
The Martha’s Vineyard location and its unique citizenry become characters themselves, but of course its Bruce the mechanical shark that always steals the show – for better or worse. Fifty years later, you’re glad that CGI wasn’t around in the summer of 1974, as Bruce’s “less is more” performance still holds up every time.
From the cast members to the score to the USS Indianapolis monolog to the film’s effect on studio production, marketing and even shark conservation, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story covers just about every angle you’re hoping for. It is the perfect exclamation point to this month long birthday celebration.
I just wonder why the “fin” in Definitive isn’t capitalized.
I don’t find that funny. I don’t find that funny at all.
