Thriller

Corridor of Mirrors

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  • Title: Corridor of Mirrors
  • IMDb: link

The film debut of both director Terrence Young (From Russia with Love, Thunderball) and actor Christopher Lee (albeit in a minor role), 1948’s Corridor of Mirrors is an atmospheric thriller involving an eccentric bachelor (Eric Portman) who falls in love with a young woman (Edana Romney) who eerily resembles a Renaissance painting he keeps in his home. Their relationship mostly involves Mangin (Portman) dressing Mifanwy (Romney) in a variety of dresses and jewelry that fit her perfectly. As she struggles against his control, and the warnings of an older woman (Barbara Mullen) in the house suggesting dangerous ulterior motives in Mangin’s actions, their relationship ends disastrously, and, years later, tragically.

Although it may feel a bit dated in places, the tone and tension of the story hold up well as does Young’s direction and the cinematography of André Thomas. Re-released on Blu-ray and DVD as part of the Cohen Film Collection, Corridor of Mirrors is worth visiting for fans of the era or the genre. …

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The Voyeurs

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  • Title: The Voyeurs
  • IMDb: link

The Voyeurs

The Voyeurs is an thrill-less tale of a naïve couple too cute for their own good (Sydney Sweeney and Justice Smith) who become obsessed watching their neighbor’s (Ben Hardy) sexual antics from their apartment window. Dragged down by a sluggish pace, questionable acting, and an increasingly absurd storyline, the movie from writer/director Michael Mohan is barely salacious let alone the erotic thriller it aspires to be. The Voyeurs is flaccid for most of its two-hour run-time.

After meeting their neighbor’s wife (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), who they’ve watched the photographer cheat on with a revolving door of models he’s brought into the apartment, Pippa (Sweeney) becomes overly invested in what’s occurring across the street leading to a series of bad decisions, and insane twists (each less believable than the last), before the movie mercifully comes to an end.

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The Protégé

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  • Title: The Protégé
  • IMDb: link

The Protégé movie reviewFor having a single writer and no directorial or production upheaval, The Protégé is one hell of a schizophrenic film. I don’t know if director Martin Campbell and screenwriter Richard Wenk had conflicting takes on what the film should be or if The Protégé is simply an example of the final result being far less than the sum of its parts. The action-thriller stars Maggie Q as a bookshop owner/assassin saved as a child from violence in Vietnam by a professional killer (Samuel L. Jackson) who raised and trained her to be his, wait for it, protégé.

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Big Doll House

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  • Title: Big Doll House
  • IMDb: link

Big Doll House movie reviewThrowback Tuesday takes us back to 1971’s Big Doll House. Produced by B-movie legend Roger Corman, the film kicked-off a jungle subset of the women-in-prison genre starring Judith Brown, Roberta Collins, Pam Grier, Brooke Mills, Pat Woodell, and Gina Stuart as inmates in a prison of an unnamed tropical country run by an evil warden (Christiane Schmidtmer) and overseen by the Nazi-like torturer Lucien (Kathryn Loder). Collins, Grier, and Brown would all return for the similarly themed Women in Cages released the same year.

Pushing the boundaries of what was allowed in the loosened ratings of the time, the independent film follows the basic format of the exploitation genre putting the women in various compromising positions guaranteed to get their clothes off such as strip searches, group shower scenes, catfights (one even in mud), lesbian and bondage scenes, and torture. We also get a revolution and escape plot, which would become part of the sub-genre, culminating in the group’s attempt to escape the prison during the movie’s climax. Although not the main character, the film is notable for launching Grier’s career in this genre and blaxploitation films.

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The Courier

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Courier (2020)
  • IMDb: link

The Courier movie reviewBased on true events, director Dominic Cooke‘s The Courier offers a solid period thriller surrounding Soviet scientist Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) and British salesman Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) who becomes a vital piece in Cold War espionage by smuggling Soviet secrets out Moscow for Penkovsky and into the waiting arms of MI6 and the CIA in the months leading up the the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Penned by Tom O’Connor (The Hitman’s Bodyguard), The Courier fits easily into its genre. The structure of the film, following events from beginning to end in chronological fashion, does offer a rather large shift in The Courier‘s final half-hour which may have been avoided by more imaginative editing and structure. Cumberbatch and Ninidze will gather the most interest here. The women of the story don’t fare as well. The film has a lesser interest in Wynne’s wife (Jessie Buckley) and almost no interest in Penkovsky’s family. Even Rachel Brosnahan as the CIA agent who brings the case to MI6’s attention and pressures them to make good on their promises, isn’t given anything all that interesting to do.

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