Thriller

Too Quiet

  • Title: The Quiet
  • IMDb: link

the-quietThrillers work on keeping the audience on the edge of your seat.  This film isn’t a thriller.  Character studies work by examining individuals and relationships, bringing truths and secrets out, and making resolutions.  This isn’t a character study.  In fact, I’m not sure what it is.  I know what it wants to be, but it just doesn’t know how to get there.

Dot (Camilla Belle) is a miserable and lonely young deaf high school student.  After the death of her father she moves in with a family whose own troubles make hers seem bearable.  Nina (Elisha Cuthbert) is the spoiled cheerleader who doesn’t appreciate being associated with a school outcast.  Paul Deer (Martin Donovan) is a successful father who loves his daughter a little too much, and his wife Olivia (Edie Falco) is a pill-popping addict that was last sober sometime in the 90’s.

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The Ninth Gate

  • Title: The Ninth Gate
  • IMDb: link

The Ninth Gate

Roman Polanski at his best gave us Chinatown and at his worst gave us PiratesThe Ninth Gate is a great suspenseful mystery as Johnny Depp is thrust into the world of the occult and dark knowledge.  One of Polanski’s, and Depp’s, best films.

The film opens with an older gentleman, Andrew Telfer (Willy Holt), just finishing his affairs one evening.  He then gets up from his desk and very matter of fact manner hangs himself from the chandelier of his study.  The camera pans to the books of his study for in this film knowledge can bring both power and death.

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De Plane, De Plane!

  • Title: Flightplan
  • IMDb: link

Flightplan

Flightplan is one of those movies with way too many Hollywood fingerprints all over it. What can you say about a movie that sets up a wonderful tense thriller for an hour and fifteen minutes and then chucks it all out the window for a farfetched Hollywood twist ending?  Although I enjoyed much of the film, in the end I left the theater disappointed.

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