The Sunday Girl by Pip Drysdale – this snappy, fast-paced debut thriller hooked me in right from the outset and kept me on tenterhooks. Here’s the blurb: Any woman who’s ever been involved with a bad, bad man and been dumped will understand what it feels like to be broken, broken-hearted and bent on revenge….
Paul Feig steps away from broad comedy and onto the darker side with A Simple Favour. This pulpy thriller certainly has Feig’s fingerprints on it, but it’s easily his most expressive film in ages – maybe ever. Of course, the film invites comparisons with the David Fincher’s wonderful Gone Girl. But A Simple Favour is…
Most film franchises seem to run out of inspiration before too long, but the Mission Impossible series seems to have gone from strength to strength. The Brad Bird-helmed Ghost Protocol was arguably the strongest film to date. Rogue Nation took the series in a slightly different direction under the direction of Christopher McQuarrie (Oscar winning…
I’m a sucker for a good spy drama – and Killing Eve is an exceptional spy drama. This BBC production (available here on the ABC) is a taut psychological thriller as you might expect. But its insight and its determination not to treat the viewer as an idiot are remarkable. If any TV series is…
Big Brother is watching in Upgrade, a futuristic horror-thriller from Leigh Whannell (Insidious: Chapter 3). Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) barely makes a living fixing old cars. His attractive wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) works in IT. The pair have a good relationship. All that changes though after Grey delivers a vehicle to Eron (Harrison Gilbertson). Eron is…
Toni Collette puts in a dominant performance in the dramatic thriller Hereditary. When the matriarch of the Graham family passes away, her daughter Annie’s (Collette) life begins to unravel. Their relationship was always prickly, and they were estranged for an extended period. Now cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about the family’s ancestry will come to…
Cloverfield was a unique film. Lots of fans were looking forward to a sequel to this amusing found footage monster film. The sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane came 8 years later. It didn’t feel like this film had anything to do with the initial film. Till the end of the movie. It’s clear this one was…
I can’t go past a good domestic thriller and when The Wife by Alafair Burke turned up in my mailbox, I read every chance I had over the next two days. It’s like the married version of a whodunit with an underlying back beat of “Stand By Your Man” and I lapped it up from start to finish. It’s…
Director Francis Lawrence re-teams with star Jennifer Lawrence (no relation) for Red Sparrow. But where their previous success were in the YA-friendly Hunger Games trilogy, this film is a far darker – and more adult – proposition. Lawrence (the director) has given his lead actor an intricately crafted spy thriller in which to strut her…
Duplicity, comedy and crime make for a heady mix in the clever caper film, Game Night. Jason Bateman (Office Christmas Party) and Rachel McAdams (Spotlight) star as Max and Annie, a couple with a competitive streak. Their weekly game night with friends gets kicked up a notch when Max’s charismatic brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) arrives. Always looking…
