The View From The Mountain

In The Runner (not to be confused with the 2015 film of the same name starring Nicolas Cage) Gal Godot ( Wonder Woman ) plays a London prosecuting attorney named Maia Martin who’s got a major case on the docks at the Old Bailey. She just has to drop her young son Noah (Rory Wilmot, who’s in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series) off at school before she heads out for her run. But while she’s later running in the park, Maia receives a call from an unknown man who states that he has kidnapped Noah, and unless Maia does exactly what he wants—which is to kill a star witness before he can testify—Noah will die. And we’re off! Well, not really. While it’s not as horrifyingly bad as some the more histrionic YouTube reviewers have made it out to be, The Runner is still frustrating because there’s a halfway decent movie in there, somewhere. It lacks the intensity of Nick Of Time (1995), a similarly styled thriller starring Johnny Depp, which pr...

Steven Spielberg introduced me to aliens. I had seen aliens in many movies and TV shows before I watched his Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the movie theater as a kid. But Close Encounters was the first film I saw back then to really treat the subject seriously for me, opening my mind up to the fact that aliens might be visiting our planet, and that—for once—they were benevolent. With Disclosure Day , Spielberg returns to the ‘benevolent aliens are here’ genre, but with a darker twist. Disclosure Day opens with Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) rescuing his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) from the clutches of Wardex, a corporation run by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). It’s the singular mission of Wardex to suppress all knowledge of aliens on Earth. Daniel and Jane go on the run with the Archive, a physical media library of documents and films about alien visitations to Earth, starting with Roswell. Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV meteorologist, abru...

The Housemaid (from 2025—not to be confused with the 2010 film of the same name) is based on the first book in a psychological thriller series by author Freida McFadden. Sydney Sweeney stars as Millie Calloway. a young woman down on her luck who’s struggling after being released on parole from jail. While living in her car, Millie applies for a live-in maid position with a wealthy family, Nina (Amanda Seyfried) & Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) Winchester, and their young daughter, Cecelia (Indiana Elle) and—to her delight—she gets the job. But, of course, once Millie starts working her maid gig, that’s when the real horror show begins. Despite acting like she was in Millie’s corner in the beginning, Nina deliberately creates problems for Millie that make her look bad. It turns out that Nina is a whack-job who’s served time at a mental facility for trying to kill her own daughter when she was a baby, and now Nina’s got Millie in her sights. If The Housemaid sounds like some ...

Actress Zoë Kravitz, the daughter of musician/actor Lenny Kravitz, is best known for her roles in films like Mad Max Fury Road , Rough Night , and as a very memorable Catwoman in The Batman (she was superb in that film). She made her directorial debut (as well as co-written the script and co-produced) with Blink Twice (Amazon/MGM), a psychological thriller about a cocktail waitress named Frida (Naomi Ackie) who’s busy working an exclusive event with her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) when the guy who’s running it, billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) invites them to party with him on his private island for a few days. Of course, the women take him up on his offer, looking forward to treating themselves to a wonderful vacation on a tropical island. However, Frida quickly notices some strange things happening, like one of the maids, who keeps laughingly referring to her as “red rabbit.” Jess also realizes that she’s suffering from memory lapses. But most of this is pa...

Osgood Perkins is the eldest son of actor Anthony Perkins, who was best known for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, Psycho . Osgood Perkins would make his acting debut as a twelve year old Norman within a flashback sequence in 1983’s Psycho II . After writing several screenplays, Osgood Perkins made his directorial debut (also writing the script) in 2015 with The Blackcoat’s Daughter , a mesmerizing horror film that wound up being an elegant, if horrifying, twist on The Exorcist . Original, imaginative, and deeply disturbing, The Blackcoat’s Daughter contains images that are truly chilling. It’s a hard film to talk about without giving away a major plot point, so I won’t, but it’s highly recommended. The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a darkly brilliant horror film with some great performances by its entire cast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, Lauren Holly, and James Remar. It’s also one of the most coldest films ever mad...

Back in January of this year, Netflix premiered Woman of the Dead , a crime thriller from Austria with slight supernatural overtones. I figured I’d give it a shot, since I was in the mood for a good Lifetime-type crime story. Do you know what I mean when I refer to these Lifetime TV movies? They’re goofy crime “thrillers” regarding soccer moms who become amateur sleuths that wind up being so silly that they’re more unintentionally funny than anything else. But within the first fifteen minutes of its first episode, Woman of the Dead proves itself to be more of a Hitchcockian thriller: a darker, high-brow, and sophisticated thriller that’s genuinely exciting. Anna Maria Mühe stars as Brunhilde Blum (everybody calls her Blum), an undertaker in a small Austrian mountain town where it seemingly snows all year round. Her beloved husband works as a cop with the local police force--until the moment when he gets savagely run down on his motorcycle by a black Range Rover that abr...

It’s been forty two years since the death of legendary master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock, but his influence lives on the a new generation of filmmakers. The recently released Watcher, ably directed by Chloe Okuno, is another thriller with a Hitchcockian flair. Julia (Maika Monroe) moves to Bucharest with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman), who’s been transferred to the Romanian office by his company. Francis speaks Romanian fluently, having been raised by a Romanian mother, but Julia--who’s still trying to learn the language--is lost at sea. Okuno makes a point of not translating any of the Romanian that’s spoken in the film, making us feel Julia’s isolation and frustration at being left out of conversations and life in general. But life gets even harder for Julia when she starts seeing a shadowy figure watching her from one of the windows in the apartment building across the street. Soon, she starts seeing a strange man who appears to be following her where...

Universal had been trying to jump-start its classic monster movies into a new ‘cinematic universe’ (hey, it worked for the Marvel Superhero movies, right?) for a while now, starting with a new version of Dracula that was pretty forgettable, and ending with a new version of the Mummy that was so bad--as well as being a big bomb at the box office--that it abruptly ended Universal’s attempt to create its ’Dark Universe.’ I thought this was a shame, because the Classic Universal Monsters--Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy (in a better film), and the Invisible Man--really deserve to have a comeback. So I was very happy when Universal released a new version of The Invisible Man , written and directed by Leigh Whannell, a highly creative actor/writer/director who has given us the Saw films, as well as the Insidious series (he made his directing debut on the third Insidious film). The Invisible Man was also produced by Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse studio was responsible for ...

The Hunt is yet another tired adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game , a short story written by Richard Connell in 1924 and has been turned into motion pictures at least several dozen times (both officially and unofficially), starting with the 1932 film of the same name (which starred Fay Wray, who shot this film at night on the very same jungle sets where she shot King Kong during the day) and including the very silly (but still vastly entertaining) Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity in 1987. The basic story is that of a famous hunter who, growing bored with animals, decides to hunt humans for sport on his private island, instead. The Hunt is a variation of this theme, where a group of people are kidnapped and brought to the private hunting grounds belonging to wealthy elites who hunt them for sport. But for some strange reason, the people being hunted are given working guns and other assorted weapons--which was something that not even the hunter in the origi...

I have to admit that A Cure For Wellness slipped right under my radar when it was first released earlier this year. Mainly because the movie didn’t do very well, and quickly slinked out of theaters due to the bad box office. When I discovered that it had been directed by Gore Verbinski, I didn’t want to see it because I wasn’t a big fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean films that he made (granted, the first Pirates film was an enjoyable piece of fluff, but its countless sequels are a real slog to get through). But I was reminded that Verbinski also directed The Lone Ranger reboot, which I really liked (and I’m probably one of five people who do so), and he also helmed the superb remake of The Ring , starring Naomi Watts and a really scary videotape. With A Cure For Wellness Verbinski pulls you in slowly, showing an office worker keeling over from a heart attack while working late one night. It turns out that this deceased fellow was Morris, a close confidante to Pembrok...

I first saw the original Murder On The Orient Express back in the late seventies, maybe early eighties, on the then nascent cable TV, which was still pretty much unknown and struggling for viewers. My mother was an early subscriber, having been lured in with the idea of watching movies uncut, uninterrupted--and usually very late at night, which was when the cable channels would air the more racy, adult-themed stuff. Watching Murder On The Orient Express back then was my introduction not only to its hero, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, but to his creator, Agatha Christie. And the movie imbued in me a deep fascination with the character that led me to seek out the Poirot books. The new film, which stars Kenneth Branagh as Poirot (and was directed by him as well), is extremely faithful to the original story--which meant that I knew going in who the killer would be. But that did not bother me; I was never one of these people who gets overly bent out of shape over spoilers. Because, ...