Mystery

[4] Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity, The Lady Eve) stars in this tepid TV movie about a woman who moves with her niece (Katherine Winn) to an ancestral home where they’re haunted by ghosts from the Revolutionary War. The acting ensemble, including Richard Egan and Michael Anderson Jr as love interests, do their best with a script that is slow to reveal a pretty mundane mystery. …

[3] If you told me there was a movie about a single father (Robert Urich) and a female sheriff (Poltergeist‘s JoBeth Williams) who team up to solve a mystery involving a series of cattle mutilations, I’d be interested. If you indicated the perpetrators might be aliens — as this film does in many ways — I’d be even more interested. So imagine my disappointment when …

[7] Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry produced and wrote the adapted screenplay for this supremely odd but beguiling movie directed by Roger Vadim (Barbarella). Rock Hudson headlines as a high school football coach and guidance counselor who gets intimate with the students and faculty behind closed doors. One of his students, played by newcomer John David Carson (Creature from Black Lake), comes to him with …

[7] Naomi Watts (Mulholland Dr) stars as a journalist investigating the bizarre, synchronized deaths of four teenagers who died exactly seven days after watching a disturbing videotape. After watching the tape herself, the clock starts ticking for Watts’s character. She finds herself in an island community where a troubled young girl named Samara (Lilo & Stitch‘s Daveigh Chase in flashbacks) seems to be at the …

[6] Steve Railsback and Peter Firth star in this film by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist) that revolves around an invasion of London by, well… space vampires. Railsback heads the space exploration team that finds the humanoid creatures on an alien ship, but once the creatures arrive on Earth they begin sucking the lifeforce out of everyone who crosses their path. Hooper said …

[7] [SPOILER REVIEW] When Twin Peaks made its auspicious debut on television in 1990, it begged the question, “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Unfortunately, the second season went off the rails and the show was cancelled before the central mystery could be resolved. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is essentially the feature-film resolution to the cult TV show, taking us through the last days of …

[4] M. Night Shyamalan, the once celebrated big-budget thriller maker of films like The Sixth Sense and Signs, has been relegated to low-budget horror movies for several years. I keep hoping that his budgetary confines will result in a burst of innovation, but that hasn’t happened yet. Knock at the Cabin is a small ensemble, one-location, claustrophobic thriller with a promising premise based on a …

[7] Kenneth Branagh directs and stars as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot in this most recent iteration of Death on the Nile. Poirot is on vacation in Egypt when he’s asked to join a wealthy socialite’s honeymoon party down the river Nile in the late 1930s. When the socialite (Wonder Woman‘s Gal Gadot) is discovered dead, Poirot is back on the case. Was it her husband …

[7] [SPOILER WARNING] Writer/director Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) delivers his third solid horror-mystery with Nope, the story of sibling horse wranglers (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) who discover a UFO hiding in a stationary cloud above their gulch ranch. At first the pair decide to get rich by capturing the first high-resolution photographic evidence of the phenomenon. But when the UFO reveals itself to …

[7] Director Sidney Lumet (Network, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) brings Ira Levin’s hit play to the big screen, showcasing Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve as warring playwrights who resort to real murder to further their careers. Caine plays the mentor desperate for a comeback after suffering a series of duds. Reeve plays the idolizing student whose written a new play Caine thinks will …

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