Smartly realized, psychologically fascinating, and brutally violent, Brandon Cronenberg’s trippy thriller Infinity Pool is the writer-director’s best effort yet.
Alexander Skarsgard
Take The American President, Notting Hill, and Pretty Woman and put them into a blender with some modern political subtext, copious amounts of illegal substances, and a handful of jokes about unfortunately timed erections and you’ll get Jonathan Levine’s Long Shot, a film that’s far more charming, sweet, and hilarious than it sounds.
With his most assured film to date, The Hummingbird Project, Canadian filmmaker Kim Nguyen takes a potentially numbing, dull, and inscrutable premise and mines it for a great amount of drama and tension.
Although Jeremy Saulnier has made a name for himself directing two of the most celebrated thrillers in recent memory (the atypical revenge picture Blue Ruin and the punks versus neo-nazis siege movie Green Room), his latest effort, the beguiling and haunting Hold the Dark, represents an artistic quantum leap for the filmmaker.
An odd duck even by the eclectic standards of most Netflix original movies, director and co-writer Duncan Jones’ Mute isn’t a movie that will please everyone, but it’s an admirably dark and sleazy sci-fi thriller that wears its cynicism like a badge of honour.
We talk to filmmaker John Michael McDonagh, writer and director of The Guard and Calvary, about his latest effort, the hilarious and gleefully offensive buddy cop action film War on Everyone (now available on iTunes and VOD), starring Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Peña as a pair of amoral New Mexico detectives who get in over their heads following a heist gone wrong.
Debuting this week on DVD and Blu-ray: Viggo Mortensen and Kodi McPhee star in the post-apocalyptic drama, The Road; Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried get romantic in Dear John; Neil Patrick Harris leads the geeky musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; and a look at the second season of True Blood.