Tag: thriller

Dragged Across Concrete

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Its title speaks of powerlessness in the face of an irresistible force and an involuntary movement in respect of a man-made, industrial era material suggesting a modern urban environment. Several characters inflict and/or are forced to endure suffering in a variety of unpleasant forms. Curiously, the literal dragging across concrete scene late in the over two-and-a-half-hour running length involves the towrope pulling of a wrecked car by a fully working one without any actual suffering at the point of dragging. Before and after, yes, but not at that point. And that scene isn’t in an urban environment at all but rather on a piece of industrial wasteland presaged by a discarded refrigerator and a dead rat on a dark road.

S. Craig Zahler’s third directorial outing after Bone Tomahawk (2015) and Brawl In Cell Block 99 (2017) boasts two starting points. A black ex-con comes out of prison and discovers his mother in debt and working as a prostitute. Two white cops are suspended for excessive violence after being caught on mobile phone video when arresting a Latino suspect. As in those earlier two films, the American director builds on his characters and their separate plights to construct a slow-paced but relentless journey through to his narrative’s conclusion. At the end it all makes perfect sense. However, on your first viewing you won’t see what’s coming. It plays out as a power struggle between various factions of white people at various social levels and black underdogs not content to stay in their place.

Ex-con Henry Johns (Tory Kittles, surely destined for major stardom on the strength of his performance here) is approached by old mate Biscuit (Michael Jai White) who is looking for help on an upcoming job which very quickly places both men well out of their depth. Meanwhile, Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn) are the older and the younger cop who although on official leave following their suspension are pursuing leads which may or may not lead them to a crime – with half an eye on making a financial killing rather than upholding the law.

Zahler is a master of characterisation and knows how to direct with a minimum of fuss allowing actors to do what they do brilliantly. He also knows how to plot a movie. The whole thing clocks in at just more than two and a half hours, but you won’t notice the time. He manages to make, for example, two cops sat in a car on a stakeout into compulsive viewing as they interact with one another. There are many similarly low key scenes involving small numbers of characters from which the wider whole would lose something if you cut them out.

The opening image shows the black Henry having sex with a white woman in bed. He always fancied her in school. While he’s certainly having a good time, she maybe isn’t so much. It turns out their meeting was set up by Biscuit as a favour to Henry. The next woman we see is Henry’s mother who got into debt while he was in prison and into prostitution to pay the debt. Now he’s out of prison, Henry vows to take control and sort her debt out. Rosalinda (Liannet Borrego) is the deaf girlfriend of Vasquez (Noel G), the dealer the two cops arrest at the start: she is involuntarily soaked in a shower, stood under a cold air fan and questioned. The two cops “can’t understand” her protests because of her Latino accent.

Soon afterwards, we’re introduced to the nearest and dearest of each of the cops. Ridgeman’s daughter Sara (Jordyn Ashley Olson) is the teenage victim of a bicycling black youth throwing a soft drink in her face near her home, his wife Melanie (Laurie Holden) a former cop struck down with MS who these days needs a cane to get around. Lurasetti’s black girlfriend Denise (Tattiawna Jones), the one woman here seemingly in control of her life, is a power-dressing professional constantly on her mobile to colleagues and clients. We never discover exactly what she does, but it involves a high degree of organisation and self-motivation and her phone conversations suggest she’s really good at it.

Part way through the narrative we meet Kelley Summer (Jennifer Carpenter), returning after maternity leave to her detested but high paying job in a financial district bank at the behest of the manipulative father of their baby. If that sounds grim, it’s nothing compared to the extremely nasty humiliations that will later be inflicted upon her as the plot unfolds.

Apart from Denise, all the women are victims. They are peripheral in this male world, even if their roles as mothers, partners or offspring motivate their menfolk to do what they do. Most of the men locked in to the overarching narrative from start to finish are victims too.

The ruthlessly efficient, criminal gang leader Lorentz Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann) spends much of the proceedings with his two masked sidekicks in the back of an armoured van being driven by the two black guys Henry and Biscuit. Elsewhere, memorable male characters are tossed into the mix for little more than one scene each: Police Chief Lt. Calvert (Don Johnson) gives the two cops a hard time, Fredrich (Udo Kier) is a shady character who owes Ridgeman, Mr. Edmington (Fred Melamed) is Kelley’s ingratiating boss at the bank.

Zahler is far more interested in telling a rattling good yarn and exploring character nuance than in playing to political correctness. If you can get past the pervasive misogyny of the piece, this slow-burner of an urban crime thriller with its gripping performances great and small will have you on the edge of your seat. A bleak and original vision of the world – and a dirtylicious treat.

Dragged Across Concrete is out in the UK on Friday, April 19th. On VoD on Monday, August 19th.

Dragged across Concrete is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

Cold Pursuit

Posted on by victorfraga

We are not anti-Hollywood at DMovies. While we often shy away from the more formulaic mainstream cinema, we also do not discriminate against it. We like to unearth the dirt wherever it might be, whether it’s a very avant-garde and experimental movie or a Disney blockbuster. That’s why I went to see the UK premiere of Cold Pursuit last night. A Hollywood action movie can be thought-provoking and subversive, too (here’s a fine example). So I attended the posh Leicester Square premiere with an open heart. I left feeling bored and cold.

Having an open heart makes no difference to the viewerwhen the director fails to put his very own heart into the film. Cold Pursuit is a thriller/ dark comedy starring Liam Neeson. It has plenty of snow and action (like it says on the tin), but that’s about it. It works neither as an adrenaline-inducing action flick nor as a comedy. Vodka shots were served prior to the screening in an attempt to get the public laughing out loud and interacting with film. It’s as if the publicists were saying: “this is not a movie to be taken seriously, but you will enjoy it once you’re pissed”. The heady mixture of alcohol and trite cinema just made me sleepy instead. I struggled to keep my eyes open throughout the 118-minute movie. A few odd people in the audience were laughing out loud, but it probably wasn’t as lively and boisterous as the filmmaker hoped for.

A comatose Liam Neeson plays Nels Coxman, a snowplough driver seeking revenge for this teenager son Kyle who died under mysterious circumstances. At the morgue, he’s informed that Kyle died of a heroin overdose. He wants to savage his son’s reputation. He was no “druggie” and “junkie”, he claims (suggesting that all people who are addicted to drugs are lowlifes not worth fighting for). His search for the truth quickly descends into a violent quest for revenge. He has to confront a drug lord named Viking and his extravagantly named henchman. There’s also a rival drug lord who gets involved in the highly convoluted plot.

This is a tale of vigilantism. And Liam Neeson is no stranger to tales of vigilantism, with Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) already under his belt. Once again, he’s a courageous father dragged out of a mundane existence in order to make justice with his own hands for his son (daughter in the case of Taken). The actor himself is no stranger to vigilantism in his very real life. This week he claimed, in relation to a friend’s alleged rape: “I’m ashamed to say that, and I did it for maybe a week – hoping some ‘black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him”. I find it very concerning when reality emulates the worst that fiction has to offer. Vigilantism belongs nowhere in a modern and civilised society. A country already grappling with gun control and mass shooting has very little to benefit from a film such as this.

Cold Pursuit is divided into 13 incoherent chapters. Nels seeks to kill each henchmen individually, in the most gruesome and inhumane ways. Each chapter is named after after one individual henchman. In the end of the film, the credits roll in order of “disappearance”. Such banal and short-sighted celebration of violence is toxic and reprehensible. There is no subtlety. There is no wit. This is not Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003), where the lust for revenge and the film breakdown into chapters are supported by a robust narrative and character development. Nels’s character development, on the other hand, is extremely shabby. It consists basically of continuously murdering people. We learn nothing about the relationship with his son.

At least one element of Cold Pursuit is impressive. The landscape in the fictional town of Kehoe is truly breathtaking. Denver’s wintry city scape is seen repeated time throughout the film, and it’s truly magnificent. The type of winter lanscape you will never see in the UK

Cold Pursuit is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 22nd. On to avoid. If you have a bottle of vodka and are seeking entertainment, meet up with your friends instead.

Backtrace

Posted on by victorfraga

Macdonald (Matthew Modine) attempts to rob a bank, but it goes terribly wrong. He’s left as the only surviving robber, with full-blown amnesia and a $20m stash hidden somewhere in an abandoned concrete factory. A group of young criminals release him from prison and attempt to restore his memory, whilst the police, led by Sykes (Sylvester Stallone), chase them down. The 72-year-old New York actor, despite being top-billed, doesn’t do much here other than just wander around as a gruff detective, as stiff as the abundant botox on his face.

Modine, on the other hand, is one of the film’s few saving graces. He throws himself into the role with relish, taking what is a relatively thin concept and giving it plenty of flavour and also a touch of pathos. It’s soon revealed that he’s no hardened bank robber, but a blue-collar worker forced by financial desperation to take on the role of a criminal. Macdonald and his accomplices used to work in a concrete factory, where bosses have siphoned off pension funds in order to get big loans from the bank, bankrupting the company from the inside. The robbery is some form of revenge.

Vulture capitalism as the culprit behind criminal activity is a recurring theme in heist films (such as Zach Braff’s Going in Style, 2017). In Backtrace, it gives Modine an extra layer of depth to play with. The locations – a world of foreclosed homes, abandoned factories and decaying lots – give the film a creepy feel and also a certain edge.

Despite these effective elements, Backtrace is a mostly drab experience. The dialogue is almost exclusively descriptive. Lines are often repeated, lest audiences too are afflicted from amnesia. The action scenes are hamstrung by a limited budget blown on hiring Stallone and Modine. It’s often the sheer lack of imagination of the filmmaker that shines the most. The gunfights at the opening and the closing of the film consist mostly of men firing at each other from behind a shelter. The camerawork is also quite repetitive and unimaginative. The camera is constantly moving and spinning around, even in the very basic shot/reverse shot sequences. It gets a little nauseating and dizzying after a while.

Ultimately, Backtrace isn’t a disaster. Modine’s performance is strong enough to keep you going. It’s a pity that the director’s hands aren’t as talented and skilled. It’s available on VoD in January 2018.

Foreboding (Yocho)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This is not exactly a remake, not exactly a reboot, not exactly a sequel. Most definitely a companion piece, though, and arguably the more effective of the two movies. And apparently, an edit of the director’s five-part series for Japanese satellite station Wowow, although it feels like a (well over two hours long) standalone feature. Kiyoshi Kurosawa revisits Before We Vanish / Sanpo Suru Shinryakusha (2017) for another story about the aliens clad in human bodies who steal concepts from people’s minds by touching a finger to a forehead E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) style prior to a full scale invasion of Earth.

Where previously the director took the material and threw a cornucopia of different elements at it, this time round his efforts feel much more thought through and the resultant film far more consistent overall – a creepy and unsettling sci-fi paranoia thriller grounded in compelling, character-driven human drama.

Kurosawa builds his reinvented narrative round shop floor worker Etsuko (Kaho) whose friend Miyuki is going mad because of the strange presence in her home. Is it a ghost? No, it’s her father but she no longer has any concept of father. Or mother. Or brother and sister. Or family. An alien has removed this concept from her brain.

Her hospital employee husband Tatsuo (Shota Sometani) is behaving oddly too – experiencing pain in his wrist. He has been turned into a guide – a human who tells his alien controller from which humans to steal concepts. His controller is the newly arrived Dr. Matsuka (Masahiro Higashide) about whom Etsuko immediately senses something odd when she meets him.

Tatsuo’s wrist pain comes from the process of turning him into a guide which involved Matsuka’s grasping him by the wrist. The pair have been going around stealing concepts from people’s minds with Tatsuo suggesting the people (picking those he doesn’t particularly like) and Matsuka doing the stealing. As it turns out, they weren’t responsible for what happened to Miyuki. That was another alien and guide.

It further transpires that Etsuko is somehow resistant to the alien concept stealing process, which means the government wants to work with her. Kaho is terrific as the woman trying to hold on to a husband being driven off the rails through a mixture of forces both within and beyond his control, conjured by a suitably agonised performance from Sometani. Higashide gives off just the right degree of unsettling otherworldliness to make you believe he’s an alien walking around in a human body.

It’s not just the playing of the actors that makes this work, though. Kurosawa invests the whole thing with an incredible sense of dread – what if I round the next hospital corridor and that alien is waiting there for me? – and stretches the tension about as near to breaking point as you can imagine. A late scene in an expansive interior is basically a woman with a gun looking for an adversary who we know to be holding an axe in readiness for attack.

Such a scenario must have been executed in countless thrillers with varying degrees of suspense or lack of it. You don’t always know what you’re going to get with Kurosawa, but when he’s good he’s very good indeed – and this is edge of the seat stuff. Hard to believe that his other version of the same story is so average, unfocused and generally all over the place by comparison.

Yocho (Foreboding) plays in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer (Japanese, no subtitles) below:

Border (Gräns)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tina (Eva Melander) is a customs officer working at a Swedish port. She is very good at her job because she possesses the uncanny ability to detect when someone is trying to bring something they shouldn’t in to the country. Tina isn’t particularly good-looking – the unkind might call her ugly – and keeps herself pretty much to herself. She’s a misfit. Her woodlands home is a long drive from any town. She lives there in a cabin, which she herself owns, with Roland (Jörgen Thorsson) who breeds dogs for competitions. The couple get along but any sexual relationship seems to have pretty much stagnated. Her ageing, care home incarcerated “papa” (Sten Ljunggren), who she makes a point of visiting regularly, doesn’t like Roland much, believing the man to be taking advantage of his daughter’s essentially good nature.

Two people she is going to stop in two separate incidents as they come through the customs checkpoint at which she works are going to change her life.

The first is a well-heeled type in a hurry who seems irritated at having his bag searched. Sure enough, there’s nothing illegal in his bag. “Can I please go now,” he asks. Tina won’t let him, insisting he surrender his mobile. He’s not happy. She sniffs the mobile. Out comes the SIM. Before she or her colleague can stop him, he swallows the the tiny card. When they eventually get it out of him, it turns out to contain paedophile porn images. High-ranking police officer Agneta (Ann Petrén) has been after a particular paedophile ring for months, but can’t seem to get the evidence she needs to crack the case and make arrests. Tina’s abilities so impress Agneta that she enlists the former’s help on the case.

The second is a man with whom Tina feels an instant rapport. He would appear to be a loner and a lot like her in many other ways too. She later learns his name to be Vore (Eero Milonoff). When she first searches his bag, it turns out he’s carrying containers of live fishing bait. A bit odd, but nothing illegal. On a later occasion, however, convinced he’s concealing something, she has her colleague strip search the man. The colleague finds nothing – or rather, nothing actionable. It’s all a bit embarrassing. And a bit of a plot spoiler of which we won’t reveal the specifics here. As a relationship subsequently develops between Tina and Vore, she discovers things about him she hadn’t anticipated along with some unexpected truths about her own past and identity.

This is an extremely clever movie which starts off being about one thing – a Scandi-thriller about customs border officials and cops pursuing paedophile rings – but then switches so that it’s about something else entirely (whilst totally delivering the goods as a Scandi-thriller about customs border officials and cops pursuing paedophile rings). It then pulls a second switch on its unsuspecting audience. Which makes it a tough film to review because an accurate one-line description of the plot could ruin the whole experience for you. I guarantee that there will be reviews out there which will do exactly that and – worse – the film may enter into popular parlance as “that film about (but you’re not going to read exactly what it’s about here)”, so you’re advised to go and see the film as soon as you can knowing as little as possible about it. Before reading any other reviews. It has a UK distributor so should be released here in due course. (January 10th 2019 update: it’s out in the UK and Ireland on Friday, March 8th, 2019.)

To its credit, the international trailer below does an impressive job of truthfully representing the film without giving anything away (and, for that matter, so did the blurb about the film in the LFF programme). It says the film is a romance, which it is, showing lots of images of Tina and Vore. But it’s also so much more and the trailer drops hints as to some of that without actually giving anything away. One imagines director/co-writer Abbasi having fights with his producers to make sure the trailer didn’t contain certain elements or plot strands. There seem to be about 20 different producers, according to IMDb. Clearly those were fights worth fighting and winning. (Or perhaps everyone else involved didn’t have any different ideas as to how to sell the film – though somehow I doubt it.)

What we can safely say is that, aside from being an extremely clever script about one’s personal identity and place in the world, and about people who are, for one reason or another, different from the norm, this is a beautifully put together piece of work on a number of levels. For one thing, it takes a certain lack of ego on the part of an actor to play a character who looks a long way from Western notions of physical beauty and both leads Melander and Milonoff are to be congratulated for having the guts to take on these roles and play them under a ton of uncomplimentary makeup. And they both give superb performances. (Which is not to say that there aren’t also superb performances further down the cast too.) For another, the prosthetic makeup work itself is highly impressive.

There’s more to recommend the film: happily, the people who decided to make this Sweden’s contender for the Best Foreign Film thought so too. We at DMovies aren’t huge admirers of Oscar bait, but sometimes countries select films which we’re happy to get behind: this is one of those. So, make a note of the title, don’t read any further reviews or coverage of it and put Border on your must see list for when it comes out in the UK (it has no release date set at the time of writing). Dirtylicious? Absolutely!

Border plays in the 62nd BFI London Film Festival, where this piece was originally written, and also at the Cambridge Film Fest. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 8th, 2019. On Amazon Prime, DVD and Blu-ray on Monday, July 15th. Watch the excellent, spoiler-free film trailer below:

Revenge

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Flown in by private helicopter pilot, Frenchman Richard (Kevin Janssens) takes Jen (Matilda Lutz) to his luxury home in the middle of the desert for a day or so. He is clearly rolling in money, she appears to be in love with him but perhaps she’s play acting: something of the gold-digger in her, maybe. She wears skimpy clothing emphasising sexual aspects of her body. She comes on strong to him. Passion ensures. All of which is a lot less fun to watch than it sounds: the male is little more then a caricature of the sort often found in the less carefully made end of French action and gangster movie production while the girl displays every patriarchal cliché in the book in the way she moves, dresses, acts and interacts.

Director Fargeat has a very different agenda, however. The next morning, Jen is startled by the unexpected appearance of two male gunmen outside the patio window. Richard’s business associates Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) have arrived for the three men’s hunting party a day earlier than expected, shattering the couple’s intended privacy. No matter: all four drink and party into the night and Jen just can’t resist coming on as strong to Stan as she did to Richard the previous day.

The day after that, when Richard is away for a few hours, Stan tries his luck at love, is understandably shocked when Jen rejects his advances then somewhat less understandably rapes her. He even invites Dimitri to join in, but the latter is nursing a hangover and leaves them to it, turning up the TV volume to drown out the woman’s cries. When Richard returns, being an irredeemable male stereotype, he sides with his two pals not his girlfriend.

At this point, the by-the-numbers feminist tract suddenly becomes both inventive and interesting. Ensuing events lead to Jen’s impalement on a small, desert bush. Her self-extrication leaves her with a distinctly phallic, pointed piece of wood through her stomach. She retreats to a womb-like cave and ingests some of the local peyote to remove the wooden projectile, cauterise the wound and emerge as a blackened, scantily clad huntress who will track down each of the three men in turn and exact her revenge. The remainder of the film (which is most of it) does exactly what it says in the title – and with considerable style.

It’s not the woman reborn theme and intentions that are impressive: they arguably get in the way. Fargeat is so determined to put her feminist heroine on screen that, for instance, Jen doesn’t take the shoes off the first man she kills but proceeds to track the others barefoot. The images are more arresting, the proceedings less believable.

However, what Fargeat is clearly very good at is orchestrating the cat and mouse antics of pursuer and pursed, on which level Revenge is absolutely peerless once it eventually gets going. On foot, she tracks down one of the men parked by a waterhole, another as he drives along a trail and finally her former boyfriend back at the luxury home where it all started, now a labyrinth of slippery, bloody corridors. Fargeat has fun with some highly sexualised Freudian imagery too, for instance having a man open up a vagina-like wound in his foot when he steps on a piece of broken glass. Apparently the director admires David Cronenberg.

If you can overlook its tedious, predictable male fantasy first reel, the last two thirds of Revenge deliver an edge of the seat thriller with a compelling, blood-soaked climax. From the moment the male/female power roles reverse, it becomes utterly compelling on a non-rational, visceral level, a French, feminist tract masquerading as a trashy US action thriller. Clench your teeth through the opening reel and you’ll enjoy (if that’s the right word) everything that follows.

Revenge is out in the UK on Friday, May 11th with a preview at PictureHouse Central, London + Q&A with Director Coralie Fargeat and star Matilda Lutz on Friday 4th at 6.30pm. It’s out on VoD on Monday, September 10th.

Watch the official UK film trailer below (but be warned – it contains one serious spoiler: we recommend you watch the whole movie first):

The Third Murder

Posted on by Alasdair Bayman

F ollowing his captivating examination of the family in After the Storm (2016), Hirokazu Koreeda continues his prolific form of one-film-a-year and delivers a multi-layered emotional tapestry in The Third Murder. Pre-dating the appearance of the title on screen, Misumi (Kôji Yakusho) commits the titular cardinal sin, whilst stealing the dead man’s wallet. Charged on the account of murder and robbery, his fate looks sealed until the prudent lawyer Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama) seeks to add truth to the matter. Retaining the familial themes that have imbued his works with a vibrant quality, whilst venturing to pastures green, Koreeda entrances you into the seams of his narrative; leaving one emotionally charged and contained.

Throughout, the murder which Misumi has committed only has one valid piece of evidence; his confession. Apart from the fact he worked at a canning factory owned by the man he killed, there is actually very little hard evidence to support Misumi committing murder. Shigemori is all too aware of this and proceeds to look beyond Misumi’s confession and study the actual narrative of the killing. Previous to Shigemori’s involvement, his father examined the case but was all too swift to jump towards the conclusion that the murder was all down to Misumi.

Working in a small team of four, Shigemori’s work relationship is imbued with a tender stroke by Koreeda. Replicating the narrative bonding act of eating noodles, which is so fundamental to the relationships in After the Storm, ingrains a delicate characteristic to the lead. Acting as a cathartic escape from the stresses of the murder case, such senses add levity towards the Noirish elements of Misumi’s brutal act of murder. The fine balance between light and dark tones is an artistic stroke of virtuosity from the director, resulting in a deep emotion investment to all the characters, regardless if they are criminals or not.

Similar to Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2015) an exploration of young femininity is unearthed in Sakie (Suzu Hirose). The daughter of the man Misumi killed-or seemingly so- she is a vulnerable tender being. Operating to a level of secrecy towards Shigemori, the secrets of her father are uncovered through her. Hirose’s graceful pale faces furthers the progress of her character’s tenderness too.

Matching Misumi and Shigemori, Mikiya Takimoto’s CinemaScope camera fills their claustrophobic encounters in the holding cell with peculiar angles, occasionally merging the two men’s faces together or intimately. Recalling the aesthetics of Robby Müller’s cinematography in Wim Wender’s essential Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984), it is absorbing to witness.

Adding to an already impressive and varied filmography, Koreeda serves up a delightful slice of enthralling cinema. Akin to the varying genres explored by Francois Ozon from 8 Women (2002) to Frantz (2016) knows what field the Japanese director will operate in next. This interchangeable form of filmmaking is as good as it gets.

The Third Murder was out in UK cinemas in March. It’s out on VoD on Monday, July 16th. The director won the Palme d’Or in Cannes for his latest film Shoplifters, yet to be released in the UK and elsewhere.

The Nile Hilton Incident

Posted on by victorfraga

A wonky TV signal that the local supplier can’t fix seems to be symptomatic of the life of Police Commander Noredin (Fares Fares). Separated from his wife, he lives in a sleazy Cairo apartment. At work a colleague shows him Facebook, but later when the internet goes down Noredin doesn’t get why the social networking website doesn’t work. Clearly, justice isn’t exactly secure in such scarcely competent hands, at least not in The Nile Hilton Incident.

When the corpse of a beautiful girl turns up in a hotel room, Noredin is called in to investigate. He has to locate another girl who may have seen the killer. Salwa (Mari Malek) is a chambermaid but she’s also an immigrant working illegally which means that tracking her down may prove difficult.

It’s hard to like the central character here: Noredin doesn’t seem to possess much in the way of redeeming features. Perhaps that’s the point: perhaps the filmmaker is trying to show us a state apparatus made up of people barely fit for the job. It is however much easier to have sympathy for the girl. She’s a member of the underclass trying to survive with any number of reasons for not coming forward and talking with the Egyptian authorities. Malek plays her with an arresting sense of vulnerability, lifting an otherwise uninspiring effort (one dirty splat) to another level (erm – two dirty splats – we’re still struggling here) whenever she appears on the screen.

As the plot progresses, it becomes clear that the chief suspect for the murder is a powerful property magnate who knows all the right people and could probably choose to have sacked any government official or policeman he wanted to. And the film ends with images of Arab Spring protestors placing all this in context. The problem is, apart from the immigrant girl, as a crime thriller this is pretty lacklustre stuff and fails largely to grab the attention. Because of its local colour aspect and political context, one wants it to be much, much better than it is. In the end, those two factors alone, good though they sound on paper, can’t save it from being something of a dud.

The Nile Hilton Incident was out in the UK March 2nd. It’s available for digital streaming in July.

Fast Convoy (Le Convoi)

Posted on by victorfraga

Cinema certainly has an association with a literal ‘need for speed’ and none more so than in Frédéric Schoendoerffer Fast Convoy. Offering a high-octane merge of zooming cars and an atypical hitman, its speed does not necessarily result in a riveting nature. Stylised to an inch of its life, through the six different men involved in trafficking cocaine and other drugs from Malaga into France. All accompanied by blacked out German cars and fine leather jackets, it’s a routine piece of European thriller that feels somewhat of a mixture between the Locke’s dialogue-based scenes in a fast moving vehicle and Luc Besson’s stories in the Transporter series.

Featuring Benoit Magimel, widely known for his role in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), the film reflects the kineticism of fast travel through constantly switching to different members of a convoy escorting drugs across southern Europe. Accompanied by undertones of an aspiring Islamic working class in France, who are forced to turn towards such criminality in order to survive, through Fast Convoy’s cinematic diversity, a touchstone of social and economic problems in contemporary France and Europe is revealed. Likewise, the racial identities of the police are rarely seen, adding to this political message increasingly so.

When two of the crew crumble under the press of a police checkpoint, Magimel’s Alex is forced to clean up the mess left by Elyes’ (Mahdi Belemlih) inexperience. Sporting a pair of 1999’s Matrix-esque (Lana/ Lilly Wachowski) sunglasses, a fast Porsche 4 x 4, he is clearly a man with a particular set of skills for a particular task. Still, in the final few fleeting moments, in the company of Nadia (Reem Kherici), a civilian who gets taken hostage when Elyes steals her car, gives a glimpse behind the emotional shield that Alex so constantly maintains. In the moments of dialogue he has, the character attempts to interact with Nadia, furthering this reading. Throughout, there is a sense of a brokenness relating to all the male characters, calling into question their place in this hyper-masculine environment of guns, drugs and fast driving.

Divided by a distinct colour palette in the first half of the film where the screen is filled with jovial conversations about the men’s favourite sex positions, the yellow ting which accompanies these scenes is a literal stark contrast to the deep bluish night time that closes out the piece. Granted, the characters are not as deepened as the cinematography of Vincent Gallot, who filmed taken, they still service the tense plot. Gallot is an indicator of the film’s aims in targeting the same audience as such Taken films.

Thankfully not as outlandish and gravity-defying as a different piece of car-related film (The Fast and Furious series), what Fast Convoy offers instead of flying cars is a solid piece of high-budget American-influenced French film.

Fast Convoy is available on all major VoD platforms as part of the Men on the Edge strand of the Walk this Way collection.

Men on the verge of a criminal break-in

Posted on by victorfraga

Many people think of Hollywood when they think of action movies, and they forget that Europe is also teeming with gangsters, bank robbers, crooks and all sorts of dirty criminals. These rogues are everywhere: in Southern Spain, on the roads of France, in the dark and derelict suburbs of Berlin and even in virtually “crime-free” Scandinavia. You just have to look! Thankfully, the Men on the Edge Collection, which is part of the Walk This Way initiative, is here to help us. Walk This Way is funded by EU Media (a sub-programme of Creative Europe) and is aimed at fostering and promoting straight-to-VoD European cinema.

We spoke again to Muriel Joly, Head of the Walk this Way, and asked her where the idea for Men on the Edge came from. She explained: “our aim is to create a collection of thrillers that would more embody the European film noirs in all their diversity. A typical genre carried out by a great tradition of famous authors and scenarists. Thriller is a genre for audience everywhere in the world thus this is one of the most successful Walk this Way Collection. We wanted to highlight the characters more than the genre, as all these films have in common to have heroes and plots that are intense, but each story is so different, as they take place in France, Scandinavia, United-Kingdom…”

She goes on to described how the films are compiled: “Since 2015, 17 films (including this year’s releases) have been part of the collection. Each film is available in at least three European countries and we ask for the movies to be also available in at least one of the three priority areas outside Europe: United States, Latin America and Japan. We select them on both editorial and sales criteria, thanks to our network of sales agents partners.”

So let’s now change this notion that European cinema can’t go fast, wild and dirty. Our men too know how to shoot and misbehave. Long live our robber, swindlers and racketeers! Click here for the full catalogue of the Men on the Edge collection. And check out the two latest releases just below, both from – dirty reviews of both movies will follow soon!

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1. Fast Convoy (Frédéric Schoendoerffer, 2016):

A “go fast” convoy shipping a ton of cannabis Malaga in southern Spain is disrupted following a shoot out that results in the kidnapping of a tourist. The picture at the top of the article in from Fast Convoy.

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2. Thank You for Calling (Pascal Elbé, 2016):

Biography based on the life of conman Gilbert Chikli who invented the “CEO scam” and was able to persuade bank and company officers to transfer money by simply ringing them and impersonating their CEO. He is now living in luxury in Israel. The second picture illustrating this piece was taken from Thank You for Calling.

Hounds of Love

Posted on by victorfraga

A very twisted couple is the centrepiece of this brand new Australian feature, which has left critics around the world raving. John and his wife Evelyn (Stephen Curry and Emma Booth, pictured below) enjoy abducting young girls, hiding them in their home, torturing and sadistically killing them. Welcome to the strange world of Hounds of Love.

The film opens in slow motion with young girls playing netball, while John and Evelyn watch them from inside their car in a distance. After the game ends, the couple stops vehicle car close to a teenager who is walking alone. Evelyn convinces her to get inside and soon after we watch the girl being murdered. Meanwhile, we are introduced to Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings, pictured at the top), who has a very strange relationship with her mother (Susie Porter). She’s on the way to see her mother as she is offered a lift by John and Evelyn.

Ashleigh Cummings’s terrific performance is the film’s highlight, and it will keep haunting you throughout. Her chemistry with other characters, her physical aura, and her delivery of lines are simply superb. Susie Porter is also outstanding. The frustration at not being able to find her daughter, the realisation of her mistakes, the refusal to go back to her husband: she conveys every emotion with perfection. Her scream at the end of the movie will leave you shell shocked.

Stephen Curry and Emma Booth as the murderous couple are good performers, too. The problem is that their motif is missing, and so it is very difficult to grasp their relationship. She’s a failed mother, a possessive spouse, and yet she doesn’t want her husband to kill Vicki. I fail to understand whether she’s meant to be a strong character or not

The cinematography is effective and it gives you a very good feel of 1980s. The production design and the music score are convincing enough, but the duration of the movie at nearly 110 minutes feels a bit long. The screenplay is tense and edgy – but only until the climax, which is a little disappointing. Overall, this is a dirty and disturbing movie, the problem is that you have probably seen it all before.

Hounds of Love opens on Friday July 7th in cinemas across the UK.

Click here for our review of another film directed by an Australian and about the subject or kidnap, and out in UK cinemas right now.