Under The Shadow

What do you do when the people outside are worse than the horror inside the house?

Moonlight

2016 - Directed by Barry Jenkins.  Written by Barry Jenkins based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney.  Starring Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Travante Rhodes, Janelle Monáe, Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali

★★★★★

Sometimes,  a movie just works from beginning to end and when you search for something, anything to criticize it starts coming down to "oh hey, I'd have liked more of this one thing."  Such is Moonlight, the story of a young boy in Miami searching for his identity in three separate phases of his life.  We first meet him around ten, called Little, as he's dealing with a mother sort of keeping it together as a nurse who also has a crack habit and also dealing with bullies chasing him from school.  It's the sort of thing where you can tell this has been going on for a while and could be going on for quite a while more.

Swiss Army Man

Swiss Army Man (2016) - Directed and written by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan.  Starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

★★★★ 1/2

What seems at first almost an odd excuse for farting corpse jokes becomes something much deeper and stranger and sad, but with a weird joy to it. This could have been a disaster in execution but instead builds into something wonderful and strange.

Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids

Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (2016) - Directed by Jonathan Demme.

★★★★

I'm really not sure what I have to say about this.  It's massively entertaining, Demme remains probably the best concert documentarian alive and Justin Timberlake comes across as one of the hardest-working entertainers you'd ever want to meet.

Don't Breathe

Don't Breathe (2016) - Directed by Fede Alvarez.  Written by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues.  Starring Jane Levy and Stephen Lang

★★★★

I can't decide if this home invasion thriller turned on it's ear has one twist too many or just enough, but either way it's almost sickeningly effective with it's turns of events.  To say anything more about the plot than Jane Levy plays a young woman in Detroit who goes to invade the home of a blind veteran (an excellent Stephen Lang) and then things spiral out of control would be to reveal too much.  Suffice to say that if Fede Alvarez and Jane Levy, who previously collaborated on the far-better-than-we-deserved remake of Evil Dead in 2013, want to keep on making movies together than I'm completely on board for that.

Incidentally, this is the third Detroit-based horror film I can think of in recent years after Only Lovers Left Alive and It Follows. That's an interesting mini-trend.