“There’s not always only one answer, yet people always seek the one answer....I wonder why?”

Couldn’t help but think of early Lang while watching this. Not only are the murders preceded by an assassin’s whistling (trading in Grieg for Dvorak), but there’s even a sinister Dr. Mabuse-like supervillain on the prowl. Moreover, the corrosive, anxious outlook, envisioning a world wherein the denizens remain zombified even as tech stimuli dominates their environ, strikes me as weirdly of its time and prescient,…

A standard (but enjoyable) teen drama bolstered by a terrific sense of place. Here, Foley peppers otherwise familiar scenes with flourishes that add resonance, like framing his characters against the backdrop of their Rust Belt town, a place wherein monolithic smokestacks protrude in seemingly every direction, or letting the steel mill whistle sound in the background, as if to indicate what lies in store for those who don’t “get out”. There’s even something satisfying about simply watching these mostly aimless…

A puzzle box for the ages: seemingly deceptively simple on the surface — it is, after all, the story of a man who succumbs to madness, eventually running amok while spending a winter with his family in isolation — but there’s more than one method of opening The Shining's myriad doors.

What I’ll say is there are few films, horror or otherwise, which effectively portray white male hysteria and the terrifying upshots of such behavior. The movie refuses to explicate…

"I'm a cop. You're a drug trafficker. I didn't betray you; I busted you."

First-rate entertainment, and with some profound social commentary (which will be further inspected upon a necessary rewatch) underneath it all. Full proof that meat-and-potato crime/thriller outings aren't synonymous with Z-grade filmic idiocy punctuated by killer one-liners. (Although Captain Zhang's quote [see above] is pretty sick!) Taking the simple premise of a drug lord evading execution by assisting a police unit in taking down fellow drug barons,…