Review: Cold in July (dir. by Jim Mickle)

Posted on April 13, 2026 by Arleigh

“What are you going to do when a dog goes bad on you… bites somebody or hurts somebody? There’s only two things you can do, right? You either chain him up… or put him down. But which do you think is more cruel?” — Ben Russell

Cold in July opens with a jolt of primal terror, the kind that shatters the fragile illusion of safety in one’s own home. It’s the sticky summer of 1989 in small-town East Texas, where Richard Dane, a soft-spoken picture framer embodied with exquisite restraint by Michael C. Hall, stirs from sleep to the creak of floorboards under an intruder’s weight. No time for second thoughts; his hand finds the .38 revolver under the pillow, and in the inky darkness of his living room, he fires. The body hits the carpet with a thud, blood pooling like spilled ink. The local law rolls up, commends him under Castle Doctrine—self-defense sanctified by statute—and hauls the corpse away. But Richard can’t wash away the echo of that shot. Hall captures the everyman’s unraveling with microscopic precision: the thousand-yard stare at family photos, the hesitant touch of his wife Ann’s shoulder, the way he now checks locks twice before bed. He’s no vigilante archetype; he’s a man whose moral compass, once pointed true north, now spins wildly in the aftermath, haunted by the ghost of a kid he never knew.

Into this fragile peace stalks Ben Russell, the dead boy’s father, a parolee fresh from Huntsville’s iron grip, played by Sam Shepard as a specter of weathered fury. Shepard infuses Ben with that laconic Texan menace, eyes like weathered shale, voice gravel ground under boot heels. He doesn’t roar threats; he etches them into Richard’s walls—”YOU TOOK MY BOY”—and reduces Richard’s beloved Cadillac to a smoldering husk in the driveway. Ben’s grief manifests as a slow siege: parked across the street, watching Richard’s young son Jordan pedal his bike, a predator’s patience masking paternal devastation. The sheriff dismisses it; Ben’s alibis are airtight, greased by unseen hands. Richard’s domestic idyll fractures—nights fractured by paranoia, meals choked down in silence, a marriage straining under unspoken blame. Here, director Jim Mickle, adapting Joe R. Lansdale’s novel with co-writer Nick Damici, pivots from chamber-piece tension to a labyrinthine noir, peeling back layers of small-town complacency to expose the rot beneath. The film’s ’80s patina is immersive: wood-paneled walls sweating humidity, CRT screens buzzing with local news, Jeff Grace’s synth pulses throbbing like a migraine.

Enter Jim Bob Luke, Don Johnson’s hurricane in cowboy boots—a private investigator with a cherry-red Cadillac horned like a longhorn bull, Stetson cocked at a defiant angle, and patter slick as spilled bourbon. Johnson channels pure Miami Vice charisma, but earthier, a good-ol’-boy philosopher packing heat and homilies in equal measure. Hired by Richard to shadow Ben, Jim Bob unearths the seismic twist: the corpse in Richard’s living room wasn’t Freddy Russell, Ben’s son. The real Freddy lurks alive, ensnared in a subterranean web of illicit recordings peddled to depraved collectors, tentacles reaching into Dixie Mafia coffers. Those grainy tapes—clandestine glimpses of human extremity, captured in derelict husks of industry—form the film’s shadowy core, a vortex pulling the trio into moral freefall. Mickle evokes the era’s snuff hysteria without exploitation: no money shots of viscera, just the implication of captured agony, faces contorted in private hells, traded like contraband smokes. Freddy’s not victim but architect, his boyish features warped in the flicker of self-made damnation, a progeny turned parasite on society’s underbelly.

This revelation refracts the narrative through fractured prisms of identity and inheritance. Ben’s vendetta, born of purest paternal fire, curdles into horror as he beholds his bloodline’s perversion—proof that nurture’s failures can birth monsters no paternal love can redeem. Shepard’s performance peaks in silent devastation, a father unmade by the reel spinning his failure. Richard, the reluctant catalyst, crosses his own Rubicon; the man who fired in panic now shoulders a rifle into the fray, his arc tracing the corrosion of innocence by complicity. Jim Bob, ever the fulcrum, tempers the descent with levity—quips about hog-tying demons, a portable TV blasting The Three Stooges amid stakeouts—yet his bravado masks a code, a line drawn against the abyss. Their alliance, uneasy as oil and water, embodies the film’s thesis on makeshift brotherhood: strangers forged in crisis, bound by shared outrage against systemic blindness.

Deeper still, the forbidden footage interrogates voyeurism’s seductive poison. Richard’s first encounter with the tapes mirrors our own—initial revulsion yielding to morbid pull, the screen a portal to unfiltered id. Mickle frames it as cultural id, echoing ’70s/’80s panics over bootleg horrors like Faces of Death, where myth blurred into reality, VHS democratizing depravity. The mansion raid—a decaying palace of vice, corridors echoing with muffled cries—confronts not just Freddy but the machinery of consumption: projectors whirring, stacks of cassettes labeled in code, a clientele shielded by badges and bribes. Ben’s Oedipal climax shatters illusions; he doesn’t save his son but euthanizes the illusion, a mercy killing of legacy. Richard emerges scarred, paternal instincts twisted—he shields Jordan not from burglars now, but from the world’s hidden reels. Jim Bob’s fate underscores sacrifice’s cost, his flair extinguished in gunfire’s roar.

Thematically, Cold in July wrestles with manhood’s brittle myths in Reagan-era Americana. Richard starts as domesticated archetype—provider, protector by proxy—only to reclaim agency through blood, a Darwinian baptism. Ben embodies failed patriarchy, his prison-hardened shell cracking to reveal vulnerability’s raw nerve. Jim Bob, the id unbound, revels in machismo yet weeps for the fallen, humanizing the trope. Violence accrues gravity: each trigger pull exacts tolls—Richard’s queasy recoil post-kill, Ben’s hollow victory, the collateral innocents. Mickle’s visual lexicon amplifies this: desaturated palettes chilling the Texas swelter, shadows swallowing faces in interrogation rooms, slow-motion casings arcing like fallen stars. Lansdale’s source infuses pulp authenticity—dialogue taut as barbed wire, twists coiled like rattlers—elevated by Mickle’s restraint, never mistaking style for substance.

Flaws surface in the third act’s escalation: a shootout inferno, bodies stacking amid explosions, tips into excess after the scalpel-precision buildup. Threads like the sheriff’s graft fray loose, accents occasionally drift Yankee-ward, and stylistic nods to Coens or Tarantino flirt with homage overload. Yet these blemishes fade against strengths: a triumvirate of leads in career-best synergy, Grace’s score evoking Carpenterian dread laced with twang, production design nailing ’89 grit from payphone booths to mullet mustaches. Mickle’s sophomore leap post-Stake Land proves mastery of genre alchemy—thriller mechanics serving thematic depth.

Ultimately, Cold in July haunts as meditation on unseen currents: the darkness we film, consume, ignore. It indicts voyeurism’s complicity—Richard’s gaze on the tape mirroring ours—while affirming redemption’s flicker amid ruin. Ben buries not just Freddy but paternal ghosts; Richard fortifies his home anew, vigilant against shadows within. Jim Bob’s ghost lingers in punchlines and principles. In VOD glut, this neo-noir endures, twisty as kudzu vines, resonant as a revolver’s echo. It clings like summer sweat, whispering that some July colds seep bone-deep, thawing never.

Review: 8mm (dir. by Joel Schumacher)

Posted on April 11, 2026 by Arleigh

“Because he could!” — Daniel Longdale

Joel Schumacher’s 8MM (1999) uncoils like a reel of forbidden footage you shouldn’t have found, pulling a buttoned-up private eye into the rancid shadows of underground smut peddlers and whispers of snuff films that may or may not exist. It’s a late-’90s thriller smack in the wake of Se7en and Kiss the Girls, starring Nicolas Cage as Tom Welles, a Harrisburg family man whose crisp suits and steady hands belie the unraveling ahead. Hired by a steel magnate’s widow to verify an 8mm tape depicting a girl’s torture-murder, Welles tumbles down a rabbit hole of L.A. peep shows and New York meatpacking sleaze, his moral compass spinning as the line between fantasy and atrocity blurs. Schumacher crafts a narrative engine that hums with procedural grit, doling out dread in measured doses while mirroring the protagonist’s corrosion, though it occasionally stumbles in its heavier-handed turns.

The setup hooks with surgical efficiency, painting Welles as everydad detective: he buries bodies for a living, kisses his infant daughter goodbye, and screens the tape in a vault-like study that feels like a confessional. Myra Carter’s Mrs. Christian trembles with decorous horror as the projector whirs to life, bathing the room in jaundiced flicker; the footage—grainy, handheld, a pleading teen bound for “Machine’s” blade—lands like a gut punch without lingering on gore. Lawyer Longdale (Anthony Heald, all patrician slime) waves it off as staged porn, but Welles digs anyway, tracing victim Mary Ann Mathews through missing-persons archives to her runaway dreams in Hollywood. Paired with Max California (Joaquin Phoenix), a Sunset Strip tape jockey with pawn-shop cynicism and a Zipperhead tee, they prowl fetish dens where vendors hawk needle-play loops and dismiss snuff as urban legend. Schumacher’s lens, via Robert Elswit, turns these dives into feverish grottos—neon strobes slicing steam, racks of VHS promising the forbidden—building unease through denial upon denial.

That mounting frustration propels the first hour’s finest stretches, a slow immersion where Welles’s calls home grow terse, his wife’s concern (Catherine Keener, quietly anchoring) a lifeline fraying in crosscuts. Max’s street-rat patter—”Snuff? Ain’t no such thing as snuff, man”—leavens the rot without undercutting it, Phoenix layering vulnerability beneath the snark that makes his arc genuinely affecting. Schumacher parcels revelations like a fuse burning short: a Florida trailer confirms Mary Ann’s vanishing, a porn mag scout nods toward “real death” commissions, and suddenly they’re in New York, knocking on Dino Velvet’s door. Peter Stormare vamps as the mulleted auteur of extremity, his studio a cathedral of spotlit chains where Machine (masked, hulking) performs for hidden lenses. The confrontation there explodes into sudden violence and betrayal, shattering assumptions about the tape’s origins and thrusting Welles into a desperate fight for survival, with devastating losses that harden his path forward.

This mid-film rupture peels back layers of the underworld’s machinery, revealing how far some will go to sate forbidden appetites—no vast conspiracy, just raw opportunism turning fantasy lethal. Chaos erupts in a brutal showdown that catapults Welles into lone-wolf payback, though the script’s mechanics creak here, tipping from investigation to vengeance saga with less finesse than its buildup promises. He tracks leads back to L.A., confronting scout Eddie Poole (James Gandolfini) in a derelict factory, beating out confessions amid rusted girders, then facing Machine—unmasked as unassuming accountant George Higgins (Chris Bauer), who shrugs, “I like it”—in a rain-slicked graveyard melee. Schumacher stages the violence as visceral toll, not catharsis: fists land with bone-crunching thuds, blood sprays real, and Welles emerges hollowed, sobbing in his wife’s arms over the unerasable stain. It’s raw consequence over triumph, indicting the watcher as much as the watched.

Cage shoulders the load masterfully, dialing back his manic energy for a portrait of competence curdling into obsession—hesitant stares post-tape, fists unclenching at home, exploding only when the dam breaks. It’s restrained Cage at his peak, the fury earned through incremental fracture, though some beats flirt with overemphasis. Phoenix shines brighter still, turning Max from sidekick gag into soulful foil; his death resonates because Joaquin sells the bravado as fragile armor. Stormare’s Dino struts operatic depravity, a Bond villain in wifebeater, while Gandolfini’s Poole simmers regretful everyman heft—pre-Sopranos groundwork for Tony’s shadows. Heald’s Longdale drips WASP entitlement, and bits like Norman Reedus’s twitchy dealer add lived-in texture. Schumacher elicits extremes without cartooning them, populating the underworld with deviants who feel plausibly human, not pulp cutouts.

Visually, 8MM thrums with Schumacher’s maximalist pulse tamed to noir grit: Elswit’s shadows swallow faces in peep booths’ crimson haze, the snuff reel’s jitter evokes cursed artifacts, and the loft showdown’s spotlights carve brutality like Bosch hellscapes. Mychael Danna’s score slithers—piano sparsity for Welles’s drift, synth throbs for dives—capped by Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy” warping a raid into glitch-rage frenzy. Production design nails the era’s analog underbelly: dog-eared tape boxes, industrial decay standing in for L.A. (shot cheap in Florida), all evoking a pre-digital void where evil hides on celluloid. The snuff aesthetic probes voyeurism smartly—we glimpse pleas and steel without exploitation, questioning our gaze alongside Welles’s, though the film’s flirtation with seediness risks tipping into the very prurience it critiques.

Andrew Kevin Walker’s script (fresh off Se7en) structures as moral diptych: procedural probe yields to vigilante spasm, bookended by domestic anchors that underscore the cost. No tidy psychologizing redeems the killers—Higgins kills because appetite wills it, Poole for “business,” others for greed—exposing evil’s flat banality over tortured backstories. The widow’s suicide post-truth, Mary Ann’s mom’s grateful note (“You cared enough to try”), and Welles’s scarred homecoming deny closure; vengeance hardens more than heals, bodies burned sans parade of justice. It’s a gut-punch thesis on film’s limits: some horrors defy capture, watching them unmakes the witness. Schumacher, slumming post-Batman gloss, revels in the ugly, though pacing drags early in porn prowls and the revenge rampage strains credulity.

Yet for all its stumbles—script contrivances like convenient turns, a third act veering punchy over precise—8MM endures as underrated descent, a thriller that stares unblinking into appetite’s void. Cage and Phoenix elevate genre tropes, Schumacher’s design makes depravity stick, and the core query lingers: does filming evil make it real, or us complicit? Flaws aside, it hums with the era’s dark electricity, a flawed reel worth unspooling for its unflinching grind.

Guilty Pleasure No. 104: The Parker Series (by Richard Stark)

Posted on February 15, 2026 by Arleigh

Richard Stark’s Parker novels are the kind of crime fiction that feel like they’re bad for you in all the right ways: lean, mean, amoral heist stories that work as both clinical studies of professional thieves and utterly shameless page‑turners. Taken across the 24-book run, from The Hunter in 1962 through Dirty Money in 2008, the series is remarkably consistent, yet also strange and jagged enough that you never quite relax into it. Reading Parker is like chain‑smoking noir paperbacks—self‑aware guilty pleasure with just enough bite and bleakness that you can pretend it’s good for you.

The basic premise barely changes, and that’s part of the appeal. Parker is a professional robber who prefers big, high‑yield scores: armored cars, payrolls, entire towns temporarily cut off from the world. He’s not an antihero in the modern prestige‑TV sense so much as a working stiff whose job happens to be violent crime, a man who approaches robbery with the same cold professionalism most people reserve for accounting. In The Hunter, the novel that kicks everything off, he’s double‑crossed by his wife and partner, shot, and left for dead, and the story is essentially one long act of payback as he claws his way back to New York and into the orbit of the Outfit, the crime syndicate that ultimately ends up with his money. That mix of stripped‑down revenge and procedural detail sets the tone for almost everything that follows, even when the later books drift away from personal vendetta into cleaner, job‑of‑the‑week capers.

What makes the series work—what makes it weirdly addictive—is how mercilessly Donald Westlake (under the Stark pseudonym) commits to Parker as an almost inhuman constant in a chaotic world. He’s often described by fans as a kind of force of nature, and that tracks with how he moves through these books: stoic, unadorned, perpetually assessing angles, crew members, and exit routes. Traditional redeeming qualities—sentimentality, guilt, even much curiosity about other people—just aren’t there; what you get instead is a kind of brutal efficiency that, perversely, becomes its own charisma. The guilty‑pleasure element kicks in because the novels quietly invite you to enjoy watching a ruthless pro outthink and outmuscle everyone in his path, even though the moral framework is closer to nihilism than romantic outlaw fantasy. There’s pleasure in the competence and in the clean lines of the plotting, even as you’re aware you’re rooting for someone who treats human beings like moving parts in a job.

Formally, the books have a recognizable skeleton that Stark keeps returning to and subtly bending. Most of the novels are divided into four sections: first, Parker’s point of view as he’s planning or executing a job; second, a continuation that usually ends with a betrayal or reversal; third, a shift into the perspective of whoever is double‑crossing or hunting him; and finally, a return to Parker as he fixes what’s gone wrong and settles accounts. This architecture does a couple things. It gives the series a strong procedural rhythm that fans can relax into—you know there will be a job, a screw‑up, and a payback—but it also keeps the tension high by delaying gratification until that fourth‑quarter rampage. You get both the chess match and the inevitable explosion. It’s formulaic in the same way a great blues progression is formulaic: you come for the structure, you stay for the particular variations each time.

The prose is another major part of the series’ guilty‑pleasure charge. Westlake pares the language down to something close to bare steel; the description is sparse, the sentences short, the dialogue practical and unfussy. Reviewers frequently point to how there’s “not a wasted word,” and that seems right: you feel like every line is there to move money, people, or bullets into position. In an age where a lot of thriller writing leans on verbosity and constant internal monologue, Parker’s tight focus can feel almost cleansing. At the same time, that same spareness means the violence can land with an extra jolt—there’s no cushioning around it, no moral throat‑clearing, just the fact of what Parker decides to do when someone gets in his way.

Across the series, the quality is not perfectly even, and that’s where a fair, balanced take has to admit some dips. The early stretch—The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, The Outfit, The Score, and The Jugger—has a raw momentum and a sense of discovery as Westlake works out how far he can push a protagonist this cold. Later titles, especially in the first run up to Butcher’s Moon, often expand the canvas, giving more time to side characters and to elaborate, multi‑phase heists. Some readers and critics consider The Score, with its audacious robbery of an entire mining town, a high‑water mark; others see it as simply a particularly well‑executed entry in a series where the baseline is already high. Then, after the long break between the 1970s and the 1990s revival with Comeback and Backflash, you can feel Westlake adjusting the formula to a slightly different era, with Parker still fundamentally the same but the world around him updated. Those later books are often solid and occasionally excellent, but the sheer shock of the early ones is hard to recapture.

From a modern perspective, one of the more interesting tensions in reading Parker is the question of identification. The books are not satire, and they aren’t quite celebrations; they’re closer to case files written with a strong sense of style. The theme that emerges most strongly is the amoral logic of criminal enterprise: loyalty is provisional, greed is constant, and institutions—whether the Outfit or banks or small‑town cops—are just different power systems to be exploited. There’s no sentimental criminal code here, only practical rules about not talking, not freelancing, and not getting sloppy. That worldview can be bracing and, frankly, kind of fun to inhabit for a few hundred pages at a time, particularly because Westlake doesn’t ask you to endorse it; he just drops you in and lets you watch how it operates.

At the same time, that detachment and hardboiled minimalism can turn some readers off. If you need emotional growth, redemptive arcs, or a sense that the universe punishes the wicked, Parker is going to feel either empty or actively hostile to your expectations. The closest the series comes to sentiment is in Parker’s occasional, grudging respect for other professionals who do their job well—safecrackers, drivers, heist planners—and even that is strictly bounded by the demands of survival and profit. Women, in particular, can feel underwritten or instrumental in some entries, especially the earlier books, reflecting both the genre conventions of the time and the series’ focus on Parker’s narrow, self‑interested worldview. It’s possible to argue that this is part of the point—these are Parker’s stories, and he does not care about anybody’s inner life—but it does mean the books can feel airless if you’re reading a bunch in a row.

Still, that’s the strange magic of Parker: for all the limitations and repetitions, you finish one and almost immediately think about the next job, the next crew, the next betrayal. The series taps into a very specific pleasure center: watching a ruthlessly competent person navigate systems stacked with corruption and stupidity, using only planning, discipline, and a willingness to hit back harder than anyone expects. It’s not aspirational, and it’s not comforting, but it is undeniably gripping. If you can accept an unapologetically amoral center and you have a taste for stripped‑down crime fiction with a strong procedural spine, Parker is easy to devour and just as easy to feel a little guilty about enjoying as much as you do.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Review: The Silent Hour (dir. by Brad Anderson)

Posted on November 26, 2025 by Arleigh

“One missing piece doesn’t make you any less whole.” — Ava Fremont

The Silent Hour is the kind of mid-budget thriller that used to quietly fill up Friday night multiplex lineups, and there’s something refreshing about that. It is not reinventing the genre, but it does just enough with its premise of hearing loss, a deaf witness, and a sealed-off apartment block to feel engaging instead of disposable. When it leans into that sensory angle and the physical geography of the building, it clicks; when it falls back on stock corrupt-cop beats, you can feel the air go out of the room a little.

The setup is straightforward: Boston detective Frank Shaw (Joel Kinnaman) is struggling with permanent hearing loss after an on-the-job accident, trying to find a way back onto the force and into his own life. He is brought in because he knows some sign language and is asked to help take the statement of Ava Fremont (Sandra Mae Frank), a deaf photographer who has video evidence of a brutal gang murder. Once Frank leaves her run-down apartment building, he realizes he forgot his phone, heads back, and walks straight into a hit team sent to silence Ava; the rest of the film traps them inside the almost-condemned complex with a crew of killers who, crucially, they often cannot hear coming.

Director Brad Anderson has always had a knack for tense, contained spaces, and you can feel the same instincts here that powered films like Session 9 and Transsiberian, even if The Silent Hour is more conventional. The apartment block is shot as a grim, half-abandoned maze: flickering lights, long hallways, and just enough remaining tenants to complicate any hope of a clean escape. Anderson stages several sequences as slow, creeping cat-and-mouse instead of wall-to-wall gunfire, which fits the “you can’t hear the danger” concept nicely and gives the movie a more claustrophobic vibe than the plot synopsis might suggest.

Where the film genuinely distinguishes itself is in how it uses sound—or sometimes refuses to use it. Scenes that shift into Frank’s perspective often dampen or distort the audio, letting the score fall away so small vibrations, visual cues, and body language carry the tension, while Ava’s point of view goes further, dropping into near-total silence and forcing the audience to scan frames the way she would. It is not as radical as something like A Quiet Place, but it is effective, and the sound department clearly understands that “absence” can be as expressive as any bombastic action mix.

Kinnaman slides comfortably into this kind of bruised, low-key action role, and here he plays Frank as a guy permanently half a step behind the world around him, frustrated but not wallowing. The script gives him some predictable beats—guilt, self-destructive drinking, a shot at redemption—but Kinnaman sells the physical awkwardness of someone relearning how to move and work while not fully trusting his own body. Sandra Mae Frank is the movie’s secret weapon, though; as Ava, she never reads as a passive victim, and there is a practical, almost sardonic edge to the way she navigates the situation that helps keep the film from turning mawkish about disability.

The dynamic between Frank and Ava is also where the film finds its heart, even if it is pretty lightly sketched. Their communication is messy at first—his sign language is rusty and limited, hers is fast and precise—but that awkwardness becomes part of the tension, because a misread sign or delayed understanding can get people killed in this environment. As they settle into a rough rhythm, the movie quietly nudges Frank toward accepting that his hearing loss is not just a temporary obstacle but a permanent part of who he is now, and Ava is allowed to be more than a symbolic “guide” through that, with her own fears and bad decisions hanging over her.

On the flip side, the actual crime plot is about as standard as they come. The villains are corrupt cops cleaning up a messy murder, and if you have seen more than a couple of thrillers, you will probably guess who is dirty long before the script “reveals” it. There are a few half-hearted attempts at moral compromise and temptation—a hefty bribe, old loyalties—especially around Frank’s former partner Doug Slater (Mark Strong), but the story never digs into systemic rot or moral ambiguity in any meaningful way; it just uses corruption as a convenient engine to keep the bullets and double-crosses coming.

Structurally, the film works best as a series of mini-scenarios inside the building rather than as a twisty conspiracy. You get sequences where Frank and Ava navigate dark stairwells while trying to stay ahead of men they can feel but not hear, tense face-offs in cramped apartments with panicked tenants, and a few well-staged bursts of violence that remind you this is still a pretty nasty situation. The climax leans into fire, chaos, and one last push for survival, and while the resolution lands exactly where you’d expect, the final quieter beats give the characters a bit of closure that feels earned rather than tacked on.

Performance-wise, the supporting cast does its job without stealing the movie. Mekhi Phifer and Mark Strong bring some veteran presence as fellow cops circling around Frank, and even when the writing nudges them toward archetype, they at least feel like people who have known each other for years rather than walking plot devices. The henchmen are more one-note, essentially “the guys with guns” hunting through the building, but the film leans on their physicality and menace instead of trying to give everyone a tragic backstory, which is probably the right call for a lean thriller like this.

If there is a frustration here, it is mostly about missed potential. The core hook—two people with hearing loss trying to survive in a sound-dependent cat-and-mouse game—is strong enough that you can imagine a slightly sharper script pushing much harder on point of view, communication breakdown, and the way the police institution treats disability. Instead, The Silent Hour uses those elements as flavoring around a very familiar skeleton, resulting in a movie that is solid and sometimes gripping but rarely surprising.

Taken on its own terms, though, The Silent Hour is a tight, competently staged thriller that understands how to milk a confined space and an offbeat sensory angle for suspense. The running time is under two hours, the pacing stays brisk, and there are enough well-executed set pieces and committed performances to make it an easy recommendation if you are in the mood for a darker, low-key action night. It will not stick with you the way the very best of Brad Anderson’s work does, but as a late-night watch with the lights down and the volume doing most of the heavy lifting, it gets the job done.

Review: John Doe: Vigilante (dir. by Kelly Dolen)

Posted on November 24, 2025 by Arleigh

“They failed us… so what choice did I have?” — John Doe

John Doe: Vigilante, directed by Kelly Dolen and released in 2014, is a blunt and provocative take on the vigilante thriller, brimming with social commentary and visual grit. The film revolves around John Doe, played by Jamie Bamber, whose world is shattered by the violent deaths of his family members. Disillusioned by a justice system that barely delivers justice, Doe transforms himself into a vigilante, targeting repeat offenders who continually evade real consequences. The narrative takes a non-linear approach, jumping between timelines using mock interviews, courtroom debates, and TV news segments to piece together Doe’s story and the societal mania swirling around him.

The structure of the film is both one of its most engaging features and a source of occasional frustration. Rapid switches between documentary-style “talking head” interviews, real-time action, and flashbacks keep the viewer on their toes. While this can create some dramatic momentum, it also leads to a sense of disconnect, as the story sometimes trades clarity for style. Still, there’s an undeniable energy to this format. The movie feels urgent and relevant, throwing the audience directly into a conversation about law, order, and the places these systems break down.

A major focus of the film is on the media’s influence over the public’s perception of vigilantism. The mixed portrayal of John Doe as both a monster and a folk hero reflects how quickly public sentiment can tilt depending on who’s doing the telling. There’s an uncomfortable suggestion that cycles of violence and public outrage are not only connected but sometimes dependent on the news cycle to fuel them. The film hammers this point home repeatedly, sometimes at the expense of nuance. It isn’t shy about waving its message in the viewer’s face, with characters often delivering speeches about justice, victimization, and the failings of society.

Despite some heavy-handedness, Jamie Bamber’s performance is the glue holding everything together. He plays Doe with a haunted distance rather than unrestrained rage, showing a character who’s been hollowed out by tragedy and driven by a cold, relentless sense of necessity. He’s not a cartoonish avenger—his actions clearly torment him, and his moments of uncertainty make the character believably conflicted. However, the supporting cast doesn’t fare as well, with most roles feeling thin and underdeveloped. Journalists, detectives, and secondary victims drift in and out, often serving mainly as delivery devices for the film’s ceaseless thesis statements about crime and morality.

The violence in John Doe: Vigilante is unflinching and rarely sensationalized. Confrontations come fast and harsh, depicted with practical effects that drive home the ugliness of the acts themselves. This directness serves to emphasize the horror of violence, whether enacted by criminals or by Doe himself. The film’s refusal to sugarcoat these scenes will appeal to viewers who prefer realism and discomfort to stylized action, but it may push others away due to its unrelenting bleakness.

On the plus side, the movie does succeed in keeping the viewer guessing about its core question: Is Doe’s crusade righteous or an invitation to chaos? His victims are almost unfailingly depicted as monsters, which blunts some of the intended ambiguity, but the reaction from the world around him—copycat crimes, protests, media manipulation—spins the plot in more interesting directions. The broader implication is that once a society loses faith in the courts, retributive justice becomes both appealing and very, very dangerous. While the film mostly sticks to familiar genre beats, it does occasionally land a punch that lingers. Scenes showing a growing vigilante movement in response to Doe’s actions are particularly thought-provoking, inviting viewers to consider how collective anger can quickly spiral out of control.

However, the film repeatedly stumbles over its own desire to make a point. Its depiction of evil is strikingly black-and-white, and the justice system is rendered in frustratingly broad strokes. Very little time is spent on the possibility of innocent people being caught in the crossfire or of criminals ever achieving redemption. All the nuance falls to Bamber’s performance, as the rest of the characters serve mostly as echoes of his trauma or mouthpieces for the script.

Dialogue can also be a weak point. Characters often speak in loaded, over-serious refrains about crime and victimhood. If you’ve seen other media with vigilante themes, especially ones grappling with morality, John Doe: Vigilante might give you déjà vu. It isn’t particularly subtle and tends to repeat itself, particularly in the latter half, as perspective shifts and news segments rehash similar arguments. By the time the final acts come around—with a pivotal, tension-drenched scene of Doe delivering his last “message” to the public—the narrative momentum has already started to lag.

Still, the film isn’t without its bright spots. Its editing, especially the way flashbacks are woven into the present narrative, is creative and keeps certain plot elements hidden until just the right moment. There are a few bold narrative choices—one involving a child’s perspective near the end is a standout—that briefly elevate the film above its otherwise standard revenge-thriller fare. These are the moments that will stick with viewers long after credits roll.

At its core, John Doe: Vigilante is angry and bruising, with its heart firmly pinned to its sleeve. It wants to provoke discomfort and debate, not offer easy answers or escapist fun. The movie wrestles with questions of what justice really means when institutions fail, and whether violent reckoning is ever justifiable—even for the worst of the worst. It doesn’t ultimately land on a satisfying conclusion, but that may be the point.

John Doe: Vigilante stands as a solid and sometimes stirring entry in the vigilante genre, bolstered by a committed lead performance and raw intensity but hampered by heavy-handed dialogue, weak supporting characters, and a lack of moral complexity. For viewers who enjoy gritty crime films and are open to films that raise difficult, unsettling questions, John Doe: Vigilante is worth checking out. Just don’t expect it to pull its punches—or to give you any tidy resolutions.

The Raid 2: Berandal “Gang War” Deleted Scene

Posted on April 12, 2014 by Arleigh

So, just got back from watching The Raid 2: Berandal and I must say that I was left speechless. So, while I gather my thoughts in order to write up a review here’s a clip released by director Gareth Evans of a scene removed from the finished film due to pacing issues.

It’s a scene that took close to 6 days to set-up and film and quite a bit of money to do so. The fact that it’s a scene so heavy in action that it was still deleted from the film just goes to show just how awesome were the action in the film that this particular one was left on the cutting room floor.

Trailer: Only God Forgives (Red Band)

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Arleigh

It looks like we the makings of a new Scorsese/DeNiro combination with Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling partnering up once again for another film after their critically-acclaimed neo-noir crime thriller with Drive.

Only God Forgives transplants Refn and Gosling away from the smog and seedy glamour of Los Angeles to the anything-goes locales of Thailand. Refn has described this follow-up to Drive as a modern Western set fully in the Far East with Gosling in the role of the cowboy antihero. The red band trailer once again shows that Refn will not be skimping on the beautifully shot violence and ramps up on the film’s look of heightened reality that made his previous film such a unique viewing experience.

There’s still no announced release date for Only God Forgives, but we will surely be on the look out for when it does finally come out.

Scenes I Love: Eastern Promises

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Arleigh

News that the sequel to Eastern Promises was one of the few pieces of news that really bummed me out when it made the rounds late 2012. The first film was one of my top ten for 2007 and consider it one of the better films about organized crime in the 21st century. A sequel to this film wasn’t needed, but most fans of the film wanted one just to see a furthering of the storyline between Viggo Mortensen’s character and that of Vincent Cassel’s character.

While the sequel may not be happening there’s still hope that it will get resuscitated in the future. Until that happens let’s take a look at what has to be one of the most realistic fight scenes on film. It’s the infamous (or famous depending on how you feel about the scene) Russian bath house scene near the end of the film. The scene sees Viggo Mortensen’s character of Nikolai Luzhin set upon by a couple of Chechen hitmen in the bath house where he proceeds to fight for his life in the most vulnerable fashion anyone can ever find themselves in.

Cronenberg has always been one of my favorite filmmakers and I continue to believe that his work body of work throughout his career puts him in the upper echelon, if not the elite level, of filmmakers living and working today. This fight scene has nothing glamorous about it. The cool factor that some attribute to the scene just emphasizes Cronenberg’s recent observation about the hypocrisy of those who denounce violence yet look at the violence he creates on film and call it art.

I consider this a scene I love just for the base simplicity of the scene itself. It’s primal and almost Darwinian in the lengths a person will go through to keep themselves alive for one second more. The scene also reminds me why Viggo Mortensen remains one of this era’s most underrated and greatest actors. Yes, it’s just a fight scene, but he gives so much into making it authentic that one could almost believe that his life was in danger and he did the fight for real (in fact Mortensen did injure himself so much during the several takes of the scene that his bruises afterwards became a problem for the make-up department who had to apply his vory v zakone tattoos every day).

Review: Drive (dir. by Nicolas Winding Refn)

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Arleigh

Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has made just a handful of films with most staying under the radar of most of the general film-going public. He first caught the attention of indie film fans with his Pusher Trilogy over in Denmark, but he really caught the attention of these fans with his explosive collaboration with Tom Hardy on the Bronson biopic. He would follow that film with the violent existentialist Viking film Valhalla Rising. It would take another major collaboration with another rising star in Ryan Gosling for Winding Refn to finally have his major breakout film which has caught the attention of not just the indie film fans and cineaste crowd, but the general public at-large.

Drive was first screened over at this year’s 2011 Cannes Film Festival where it premiered “in competition” for the Palme d’Or. While the film didn’t win the top prize for best film at Cannes it didn’t garner Nicolas Winding Refn “Best Director” award and his work on this film more than merits such an accolade. The film would begin to screen at other major film festivals before landing at the Toronto International Film Festival before making it’s major public release in North America. Everywhere the film went the consensus reaction to the film has ranged from positive to calls for the film as one of 2011’s best.

So, it would seem most everyone has been quite positive with their reaction to Refn’s Drive. Is this film just another indie arthouse title which the elitist film fans have begun to hype up to levels that would border on cosmic? Or is this film actually as good as it has been talked up to be by such film fans and those of the general public who have seen it? I think the answer lies somewhere in-between.

Drive has been called an action-drama to crime-thriller to film noir and even an existentialist meditation of the film variety. Some have even called it a modern urban fairy tale from the many traditional tropes and themes inherent in fairy tales. The film actually seems to defy genre labels as it’s all those and even more. Nicolas Winding Refn has made a film with so much variety in its cinematic DNA from other classic films and storytelling styles that watching the film once is not enough to find them all.

The film makes a strong statement with it’s introduction of the character who remains nameless but could be called “The Driver” or “The Kid”. Ryan Gosling’s performance in this opening sequence will set the foundation for his character from beginning to end. His driver role is not much for chit-chat and unnecessary talking with those who have hired him to be their expert getaway driver. He’s meticulous with his equipment and intractable when it comes to the rules he has set down for his clients. He would be theirs for the five minutes they need him to drive them away from their criminal acts. Whatever they do before or after those five minutes doesn’t matter to him and he sticks to this rule explicitly. Another rule which he lays down is that he will not be carrying a firearm. These rules have had some audiences bring to mind Jason Statham’s Transporter character and they would not be totally wrong to say so. What Gosling’s driver has over Statham’s is the air of realism to the role. It’s a realism that borders on hyper-reality as the film moves on to it’s climactic conclusion, but real nonetheless. Gosling’s “driver” will not do extensive and elaborate fighting skills the way Statham’s would.

The film would move from it’s powerful introduction and into a much more calm and somewhat serene section as the nameless driver gradually gets to know his next door neighbor in the form of Irene as played by Carey Mulligan. Their relationship will form the core of the film’s narrative and it’s the driver’s growing affection not just for Irene but her young son that would dictate some of the decisions he would make right up to the end of the film. It’s a relationship built not on extensive dialogue banter but mostly on meaningful glances and silent understanding between two characters who seem to have found a kindred kinship between them. It’s this growing relationship between the two and Irene’s son which almost look like a familial unit forming until the return of Irene’s incarcerated and newly-released husband Standard. This is a character played by Oscar Isaac as a man desperate to take full advantage of his last chance at normalcy and redemption, but ultimately doomed to fail.

Standard doesn’t just become the only wrench in the happy life Gosling’s character seems to want to have with Irene and her son. Into the picture also happens to come in is his mentor and business partner Shannon (Bryan Cranston doing a great job as the good-natured, but opportunistic fool character many Shakespearean tragedies always seem to have) and Shannon’s even seedier acquaintances in Hollywood mogul-turned-mob boss Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks in a chilling performance) and his more boisterous, but not as smart partner in Nino (Ron Perlman).

The film seems to settle on the low gears for the first hour of the film, but it’s during a botched robbery attempt where the driver becomes embroiled in that Drive finally moves into the high gears and stays there until the very end. Refn’s decision to use the first hour to round out and build the characters in this film definitely pays off in the end. The audience becomes quite clear as to who the players are and what motivates them to do what they do the rest of the film. Even the most secondary and tertiary roles in this film has a part to play. Even Christina Hendricks in the role of a low-level moll to a gang of criminals gets to have her time to shine if just briefly.

Once the narrative shifts from character study to an almost Cronenbergian exercise in violence and brutality does the film finally able to hook in the last few audiences who may have still been iffy about Drive. Not to say that the final 45-minutes of the film was a non-stop action film, but it does move at a consistently higher gear pace than the first hour. We see the driver having to show to the audience that he’s not just an expert wheelman for Hollywood (stunt driver by day) and the criminal underground (getaway driver by night). It serves the film well that Gosling’s character has the barest minimum of lines of dialogue. We see all we need to know about this character through his behavior that brings to mind roles played by such past luminaries as Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood.

Most likely it would be in the second half of the film that should satisfy the action junkies. While the action scenes are not of the Michael Bay-type they do show that Refn has a fine grasp of what makes an action scene thrilling. Whether the scene calls for some of the most well-done car chase on film since Frankenheimer showed everyone how to properly do it in Ronin or scenes of sudden brutal violence which calls to mind similar scenes from Cronenberg’s last two films (A History of Violence and Eastern Promises). Both types of action were done efficiently with little to no glamour to gloss over things. The burst of violence actually adds to the mystique of Gosling’s “Man With No Name” role. One particular scene in the apartment elevator where Gosling, Mulligan and a goon sent by the mob makes for one of the best scenes in the film and of 2011.

As much as these scenes of action and violence will be the ones to get the most attention from the general film-going public in the end it’s the excellent screenplay by Hossein Amini of the James Sallis’ novel of the same name which really holds everything together in conjunction with some top-notch performances from everyone involved. The film makes or breaks itself on Gosling’s performance as the driver and he delivers on all cylinders. His performance was quite reminiscent of past performances such as James Caan as Frank in Michael Mann’s Thief, Steve McQueen also as Frank in Bullitt, but in my opinion Gosling’s work in this film brings to mind young Clint Eastwood as “The Man With No Name” in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western trilogy. Both characters were the type to let their actions speak for them and were both full of quiet confidence not to mention restrained violence which would erupt when needed.

Much has been said about Albert Brooks’ turn as the mob boss Bernie Rose. how the role was quite the 180-degrees from people’s perception of the actor who usually did comedic roles. I say that Albert Brooks always had a dark side to his comedic talent. I mean he was and is megamaniacal villain Hank Scorpio from The Simpsons. In all seriousness, Brooks’ as the mob boss was the other pillar which held all the other performances focused. In fact, Gosling’s character and Brook’s Bernie Rose could almost be considered mirror-images of each other. They were characters who had found their place in the world and the role they would play and didn’t struggle against it. Everyone else in the film struggled against their lot in life. It was also these characters who had the bulk of the film’s dialogue.

Drive has been hyped (for some overhyped) since it first premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but it’s one of those rare films which has more than earned and surpassed the hype which has preceded it’s general release to the general public. It’s a film which bucks traditional genre labels by combining the themes, ideas and foundations from many different film and storytelling genres. For fans of action there’s enough thrilling action to sate them. For those who are fans of film noir this film definitely carries within it the DNA set down by the film noir of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. For some who wish to watch a film which explore existential themes then Refn’s film has that too. In the end, Drive manages to be a film which caters to so many different audiences without ever pandering to them or dumbing the story down. It’s a film made by a filmmaker who continues to impress and who has made his best film to date.

Drive is a film that is not for everyone, but it’s also a film that everyone should see and experience at least once. It is also one of the year’s best films and, so far, my top film of 2011.

Quickie Review: The General’s Daughter (dir. by Simon West)

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Arleigh

The time around the late 1990’s saw a slew of filmmakers who seemed to have been influenced by the filmmaking style of one Michael Bay. In 1998 one such film which had a certain Michael Bay look to it was the crime thriller The General’s Daughter by filmmaker Simon West (fresh off his success from the previous year’s Con-Air). This film adaptation of the Nelson DeMille novel of the same name starred John Travolta when he was still enjoying the second renaissance of his career brought on by his role in Pulp Fiction.

The General’s Daughter was pretty much a crime procedural wrapped around the secretive and insular world of military life. It has Chief Warrant Officer Paul Brenner (played by Travolta) of the Army’s CID investigating what seems to be the apparent rape and murder of a female officer who also happens to be the daughter of the base’s commandant and political-minded general. Brenner’s soon joined by another CID agent, Sara Sunhill (Madeleine Stowe), who must now navigate the insular world which makes up the officer ranks of the military. They find suspects cropping up faster than they could handle and the one prime suspect in base psychologist Col. Moore (James Wood in an over-the-top performance) has secrets about the victim that could jeopardize the lives and career of not just most of the officers on the base but the victim’s own father. This set-up and the basic understanding of the plot should make for a great thriller, but the by-the-numbers direction by Simon West and the over-the-top performances by too many of the characters in the film sinks The General’s Daughter before it could soar.

The story in of itself really has nothing to drag down the film. From the beginning the screenplay does a great job in tossing red herrings to keep the true murderer secret until the very end. It’s these red herrings which manages to bring out the ultimate reason as to the death of Capt. Elisabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson) and how a traumatic event in her past became the one major link which would lead to her death early in the film. It’s how these events were acted out which brings down the script. It’s been said that great performances could raise a mediocre script, but the same could be said for the opposite. Very average to bad performances could drag down a great script.

Travolta’s performance was good enough most of the time. He’s especially good when pouring on the Southern charm to try and gain an advantage over those he’s interacting with, but when he suddenly switches over to tough Army investigator that he goes from just beyond campy to over the line into full-blown camp. The same could be said for pretty much everyone in the film from Stowe’s character who manages to just stand around doing nothing but act as a sort of “gal Friday” for Travolta’s character until the very end when she suddenly becomes a crack investigator to help move the plot along. Clarence Williams III really hams it up as the base general’s right-hand man and one would wonder if he realized he wasn’t actually in a grindhouse or exploitation film when it was time to act.

Despite the performances dragging the film down I must admit that The General’s Daughter was quite watchable and entertaining to a certain level. It’s the film’s inadequacies which also makes it quite a disposable fare that should’ve been more. One wonders how the film would be done today with a different set of actors and a filmmaker who knew the nuances of how to navigate around a thriller. Until the inevitable remake from Hollywood gets greenlit (the way things get remade now it’s bound to happen) it’s this version of The General’s Daughter that’d be on record and it’s a film that has too many bad performances for a great screenplay to overcome. A film that ultimately remains mildly entertaining but forgettable in the end.