Thriller - Cinema Crespodiso

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Body’

Not all movies at film festivals need to strive for profundity or need to embrace some sort of cause. Sometimes movies are just movies and they are just supposed to be fun diversions for a short while, and “Body” is a film that fits that description. A sort of Hitchcockian thriller, “Body” is a wild little movie about an accidental death, the subsequent cover up, and what seemingly normal, every day people would be willing to do to save their own hides.

Holly, Cali and Mel (Helen Rogers, Alexandra Turshen and Lauren Molina, respectively) are three college age friends hanging out on the night before Christmas Eve (“eve eve?”), and Cali suggests a night time activity for the three of them in order to stave off boredom. So they hop into her car and drive way out of the way to an unoccupied mansion that Cali knows about, and they let themselves in and have a nice time, drinking booze, driving golf carts and just enjoying the big ole house. But then someone shows up, which results in a dead body, and the rest of the movie consists of the three ladies desperately trying to figure out how to get out of this mess.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Wild Tales’

“Wild Tales” is a fun, crazy, over the top movie about six separate scenarios, short stories involving different characters, none of them related to each other at all save for the fact that each story involves some sort of revenge, usually stemming from very innocuous and seemingly simple actions, all of them building to insane crescendos of some sort of violence.

To go into details about each short story and to give away what happens in each one would do a disservice to you, so there will be a lack of deets here. Suffice to say, these stories involve a strange coincidence on an airplane, a mobster getting dinner at a deserted diner, a bit of road rage, undeserved parking tickets, a family cover-up, and lastly, a wedding party gone horribly wrong. In each story, seemingly normal well-adjusted people are pushed to the edge of civility (sometimes they are shoved, and sometimes it just takes a tiny little nudge), and that thin line that separate people from wild animals often gets blurred, if not outright erased. This is evident with the opening credits, as actors names are shown over images of wild animals, like lambs and foxes – sure we drive cars and exchange pleasantries and observe man-made laws, but in the end, we are all just as wild and unpredictable as any animal in nature.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Focus’

“Focus” is a movie about a con man and his elaborate operation of conning, but it is also about the relationship this con man develops with a much younger con woman, so the story is about this con man making a big score but it is also about whether or not two people who make their livings ripping other people off and being deceptive could actually get together and have a trusting relationship with one another. And since this movie is about both of these things, it actually isn’t really about either of them, as neither story line gets enough time to grow into something special. Instead it is all kind of perfunctory and by the numbers, and that leaves the whole thing falling just a little short.

Nicky (Will Smith) meets Jess (Margot Robbie) when she very randomly decides to try to rip him off through some elaborate con that Nicky knows all about and sees right through. He explains that he let himself get “conned” out of professional curiosity, tells Jess she sucks at what she does, and leaves her, only for her to track him down and beg for some help. He shows her a few quick pointers without really teaching her anything that she couldn’t learn from a book or watching Youtube videos, and then he leaves her again, only to have her track him down, pretty much forcing her way onto his team of con artists. He eventually agrees because she is attractive (no other reason is offered so this makes the most sense), she joins the team, and despite being told by Nicky initially that she is a terrible pick pocket, she turns out to be extremely skilled at it after only a little bit of practice.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Black Sea’

In “Black Sea,” we have a classic men on a mission set up, coupled with a “gold/green can change a man” story as well as some apparent anger over the haves and the have-nots, all of this done in the guise of a submarine-based thriller, which is a genre of movie making that is not nearly explored enough. The inherent tension of such a situation is already enough for drama, but then you add in a story involving gold and betrayal and murder and you have a pretty damn good movie.

“Black Sea” starts with Robinson (Jude Law) losing his job as a submarine driver for a salvage company. Getting laid off, with a meager settlement from the company and a lack of pension, leaves him reeling a little. Having already lost his family when his wife took his kids and left him because he was spending too much time on the job, the added pressure of losing his job and not being able to find another one is too much for him. So when a shady job comes around involving a downed Nazi submarine possibly filled with gold, Robinson is ready to take the risk to go get it. He gets an old shitty Russian sub and a crew of half Russians and half Brits (plus one American) and they all head into the Black Sea, in search of this buried treasure while trying to evade the Russian fleet above them.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Loft’

“The Loft” is a twisty, turny thriller trying to be like a mix of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma and definitely falling short. If you like movies that have multiple plot twists because 2 or 3 just aren’t enough, then this is the movie for you, if you don’t mind some hyper editing and weird camerawork and overall silliness.

Vincent (Karl Urban) is a successful architect with a doting wife, four friends and a spare loft. He tells his friends that the five of them can share the loft and they can use it for their secret extramarital trysts. One morning, they find a dead woman in their loft and no one knows how she got there. Are they being set up? If so, then by who? Or is one of them lying to the others? As the five of them stand over the body and accuse each other of stuff and yell and scream and cry, we also get flashbacks of their whole story, starting with the introduction of the loft into their lives and then the different ways these guys used the loft, and how all of that may have possibly led them to their present moment of discovering a murder.

This movie might have been okay if they took a more straight forward approach to both telling the story and the visual approach of the movie. The whole flashback structure seems unnecessary. It may have been more interesting if they just told the whole story in chronological order, so that the murder is discovered about halfway through the movie. The constantly cutting back and forth feels very 1990’s, like splitting up the timeline would somehow make the whole thing more interesting or exciting, but really it is just kind of hacky. And then there are a lot of close ups of characters and a camera that moves around a lot, with lots of quick editing, and none of it was impressive or improved the story or helped tell the story visually. It just seemed like a lot of stuff designed to make the movie seem cooler than it was.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Blue Ruin’

The first time I saw “Blue Ruin,” I had a one word response:

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

See, I even went back and found it:

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. #BlueRuin

— Chris Crespo (@IAmChrisCrespo) September 20, 2014

And now that I have watched “Blue Ruin” a second time, my reaction is still the same. This movie is so damn good in so many ways it is almost unfair. When a film shows up like this, like a ferocious shotgun blast of smart intensity, it is impossible not to take notice. Who needs huge CG set pieces, hundreds of millions of dollars and an overly long and complicated screenplay to make a memorable movie? Not writer/director Jeremy Saulnier apparently, because this is a super low budget yet very simply told yet incredibly well made and awesome movie, and should be viewed by anyone who wants to make a movie but fear they don’t have the resources to make a compelling film. Guess what, people, it can be done. It WAS done. It is called “Blue Ruin.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Nightcrawler’

“Nightcrawler” is an intense little movie about some pretty big ideas. The media we consumer as a culture has to come from somewhere, and this movie focuses in on one particular part of our media, one that long ago has seen the ideal of “journalistic integrity” shredded to bits in the wake of advertising dollars and sweeps weeks ratings, that being the news, the people and companies tasked with dispensing information to the concerned public.

Like any other television program, your local news programs on the various networks are all vying for the same eyeballs, and it is a bit of a war when it comes to the ratings. And just like with any other programming entity, the better the ratings for the show, the higher the cost of advertising on said show. Get more people to watch your, show, get more money spent on your show, which means more money for the powers that be.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Guest’

“The Guest” takes a lot of elements of my favorite movies and some of my favorite genre elements and cliches and tropes and puts it all together in a slick, sexy, cool package, so I guess this is a bit of a disclaimer up top just to say that this movie kind of hits me in my cinematic sweet spot. Basically if I was making a movie like this, I would make it in the same style, if not go even harder with it, and I loved just about every choice made in every aspect of this low budget yet totally off the wall flick.

First off, the trailer for this movie is crap, and thank the movie heavens that I didn’t see the trailer or see out to watch it before I saw this movie. I advise you to do the same and try to avoid it. Now of course I DID put it at the end of this review, cause SOME of you will still want to see the trailer first, but trust me on this one, just see the movie. As for my review here, I am going to give out as few plot deets as possible while still trying to explain why I enjoyed this movie so much.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Gone Girl’

What does “Gone Girl” have in common with other movies like “Conan the Barbarian,” “Robocop,” “Starship Troopers” and “Jackie Brown?” They are all pulpy B-movies made with A-movie level commitment and talent. What could have easily been a fumbled, ridiculous attempt at a Lifetime Movie of the Week instead is a very adult, smart, twisty-turny, potboiling, corkscrew turning thriller of a movie that just manages to get crazier and crazier until the very final frames.

Based on a very popular book and adapted into a screenplay by the very author of said book, “Gone Girl” is an extremely darkly humorous look at American married life in this day and age, at least an extreme possibility of the results of such unions between people throughout the world. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) comes home one day to discover what appears to be a crime scene and his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) missing. He calls the police and the investigation starts with a couple of detectives taking a tour of his house and ends up being a nationwide media sensation involving streets filled with news vans, lawns covered with reporters, lots of shouting and yelling and television talking heads, all rising into a collection din that just puts more and more pressure on Nick, whom becomes the prime suspect more and more as the story progresses.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘A Walk Among the Tombstones’

Who ordered the grim detective noir story featuring rape, torture, mutilation, extreme blood loss, and Liam Neeson saying “Let’s get our eat ons together?” Because your order of “A Walk Among the Tombstones” is up and ready, hot and steamy and messy and in your face and not all that pleasant.

Based on a 90’s novel of some sort, part of a series of novels featuring the same character, “A Walk Among the Tombstones” is about some guy named Scudder (Neeson), an ex-NYC cop with a guilty conscious and 8 years of sobriety under his belt who works as an unlicensed private investigator. A drug trafficker hires Scudder to find out who kidnapped and killed his wife and before he knows it, Scudder finds himself sucked into a crazy plot involving other women brutally murdered in the past and possible future murders n the verge of happening unless he can do something about it.Continue Reading …