[7] [This review is of the Director’s Cut of the film, not the original theatrical release.] Kevin Costner falls in love with his boss’s wife and lives to suffer the consequences in this brutal but stylish action/drama from director Tony Scott (True Romance, Top Gun). The script sets up a friendly, almost father-and-son relationship between Costner and his boss, played by Anthony Quinn. The relationship …
[7] A young man and woman living under the care of a kindly priest get wrapped up in a series of seemingly supernatural murders. It turns out a group of modern-day pirates murdered the crew of a ship three years earlier, and now the victims’ skeletons are out for vengeance. What’s great about The Living Skeleton is that the synopsis above is only the beginning. …
[7] Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier (Green Room) serves up an attention-worthy revenge tale with Blue Ruin. Macon Blair stars as a loner who let his life fall apart after the double murder of his parents. When the man convicted of the crime is released from prison, Blair enacts his own deadly vigilante justice. But unfortunately, the cycle doesn’t end there. Worried his victim’s family might seek …
[7] Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer reunites with The Help director Tate Taylor on this horror-thriller about a lonely woman who befriends a group of high school teenagers. The teens enjoy hanging out and drinking beer in her basement until the woman, affectionately nick-named ‘Ma,’ becomes too needy and demanding of them. As they try to distance themselves from her, Ma takes drastic measures to bring them …
[8] In a traveling circus sideshow, a scheming trapeze artist named Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) marries a gullible, love-struck little person named Hans (Harry Earles) with plans of poisoning him and inheriting his fortunes. But there’s a code among sideshow freaks, and when Cleopatra’s dishonesty is discovered, the freaks set out to make her… ‘one of us’. Tod Browning’s (Dracula) Freaks was originally intended to horrify …
[7] In this revenge drama from writer/director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass), Christian Bale seeks vigilante justice after Woody Harrelson murders his brother over gambling debt. Casey Affleck plays the brother, a young man suffering from post-traumatic stress after four tours of duty in Iraq. The rest of the esteemed cast includes Willem DaFoe, Forest Whitaker, Zoe Saldana, and Sam Shepard. Out of the …
[5] Vincent Price headlines as a millionairre who offers $10,000 to five people if they’ll spend the night with him and his wife in their haunted hilltop mansion. The house is the site of countless murders and is supposed to be haunted by ghosts. But is it the paranormal the guests should be afriad of? Or is it Price and his wife, who seem to …
[8] A murdered man comes back from the dead to exact revenge on the people who killed him and his fiancee. The Crow is a dark visual delight featuring a charismatic performance from the late Brandon Lee as the title character. (Lee died in an on-set accident before the film was completed.) Stories of revenge always risk a boring second act where we’re forced to watch …
[7] Four old men and their families are haunted by the ghost of a woman the men accidentally killed decades ago in this John Irvin film of the Peter Straub story. It could have benefited from a more visionary director, because it really only taps the surface of its atmospheric potential but Ghost Story is otherwise a solid spook tale of ghostly revenge that kept …
[8] A 14-year-old goes home with a guy in his 30s. What follows is a nightmarish power struggle. Hard Candy is an intense character-driven thriller that succeeds primarily for the incredible performances of Patrick Wilson (Watchmen) and Ellen Page (Juno). The screenplay dives into murky moral waters, asking us to empathize with a young girl who inflicts torture and a grown man who may or …
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