Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti star as the world’s most likable couple a pair of theater and literature intellectuals who dedicated their lives to their careers and find themselves facing down the hard fact they might not be able to have children. Private Life is a beautiful, heartbreaking film, somewhere between comforting and devastating - like crying into a pint of ice cream. Check your pride at the door and bow before it, if you know what’s good for you. The cast, anchored by Rafe Spall, delivers solid performances across the board, but the real gem here is The Ritual’s movie monster. Said horrors are portrayed both viscerally in stomach-churning sequences and in a more metaphysical sense as psychological trauma. Now that sounds like a pretty basic horror-movie script, but I’m being purposefully vague in order to let the plot’s twists and turns play out in their own time. If you’re not familiar with the film, it follows a group of friends reconnecting for a camping trip, only to be beset by horrors on all sides. I wrote about the creation at length back in February as an excuse to talk up the design of the Norse mythology-infused monster, created by Keith Thompson, a concept artist for Guillermo del Toro who has worked on Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Pacific Rim, The Strain, and Crimson Peak. Not only has The Ritual been on a bunch of our “Best Horror” lists this year as a solid horror movie in its own right (or is it rite?), it delivered one of the most original and memorable movie monsters in quite some time. There are some Colonialist aspects of the storytelling that aren't fully fleshed out, to be honest, but Cargo delivers a creepy take on "zombies" and really makes you feel for the protagonists, a rare feat in this horror sub-genre. - Dave Trumbore It's the interactions between the humans-strangers all, some sharing the same race and gender, some not-that drive home both the decency and innate inhumanity mankind is capable of. You'd be forgiven for feeling a bit worn-out on the post-apocalyptic zombie sub-genre, but there's every reason to put that feeling aside when it comes to Cargo, a tightly focused thriller that's less concerned about shaking up this particular sub-genre and more intent on delivering solid performances. So imagine my surprise when I learned that Freeman would be the leading man in Cargo, a survival horror tale set in the Australian outback. The Night Comes For Us is one of those adrenaline-spikers that should come with a warning. – Vinnie MancusoĪny time Martin Freeman gets a chance to act in an original flick that’s not a big-budget adaptation or a detective series, I’m more than happy to check it out. It's a tight two-hour thriller plot-line that's almost secondary to the blood-soaked set-pieces cooked up by Tjahjanto and his stunt coordinators-Uwais, Muhammad Irvan, and Very Tri Yulisman-that see glass breaking, bones snapping, bullets flying, and nary a bit of CGI in sight. Taslim plays Ito, an enforcer for the South East Asian Triad who turns on his gang and has to outrun the death sentence now hovering over his head, not to mention the Triad's assassin of choice, his old friend Arian (Uwais). Writer/director Timo Tjahjanto's import from Indonesia reunites Iko Awais and Joe Taslim-co-stars in Gareth Evans' The Raid movies-for an action flick so deliriously violent and stylishly frenetic there are points I was shocked it wasn't an animated film. The hardest part of compiling a list of the best fight scenes of 2018 was trying not to give every single slot to The Night Comes For Us. Mazzei and Goldhaber are a dynamite creative team, creating a dazzling and disorienting plummet through the pitfalls of internet identity and the intensity of ambitious careerism that’s as colorful and ambitious as its leading lady. From there, Cam follows Alice down a surreal rabbit hole as she tries to discover who's behind her new web clone and how to reclaim her life, building a growing sense of unease and sick helplessness as Alice’s reality drops out from under her. Madeline Brewer stars as Alice, a successful cam girl driven to climb to the top of the ranks when she logs on one day to find she’s been replaced by a cheerful doppelganger who’s taken her face and her career. And while sex is a big part of Cam, this isn’t a movie about sexuality, this is a tense thriller about ambition, identity, and survival in the internet age. Penned by former cam girl Isa Mazzei and directed by her longtime collaborator Daniel Goldhaber, Cam not only offers a judgment-free look at the lives of sex workers, it offers one with respect. Cam is the kind of smart, sex-positive horror movie you always hope you’ll get to see, but far too rarely do.
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