You don’t have to look hard to see the shadows looming over Lisa Joy’s Reminiscence. The film is essentially a re-working of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, with futuristic elements overlaying the noirish story. What Joy does with the tale is clever, but it never surpasses the original. Joy is better known as a screenwriter, notably for…
Alex Michaelides burst on to the thriller scene with his well-received debut The Silent Patient. That book featured a psychotherapist doing his own investigating, competing narratives and a thread of Greek mythology. Given that worked for him once, Michaelides brings some of the same ingredients to bear in his follow up outing The Maidens. Mariana…
After spending time with international trouble shooter Olivia Wolfe (Devour and Prey), Australian thriller writer LA Larkin returns with a slightly more grounded, but no less feisty when push comes to shove, main character in Widow’s Island. But thematically, Larkin stays on familiar ground anchoring the action around themes of climate change and the power…
Jack Beaumont is not the real name of the author of The Frenchman, a book that itself is full of pseudonyms, nicknames and operational code names. Beaumont was, apparently, a member of the French secret service after a career as a pilot and has, since retiring, moved to Australia. Following in the footsteps of authors…
The trashy Fatale is a latter day noir thriller that’s part Fatal Attraction and part Basic Instinct. But the longer it goes the more convoluted its plotting becomes and some plot twists become a little too unbelievable. Derrick (Michael Ealy) is a sports agent who has built a successful business with his best friend Rafe…
Set on the eve of WWII, Six Minutes to Midnight is a moderately engaging spy thriller. The film is set mainly in the Augusta-Victoria College, situated in a sprawling old mansion in Bexhill On Sea, near Brighton. It’s an upmarket British finishing school for the daughters and goddaughters of high-ranking Nazis. The girls are learning…
The Cuban Missile Crisis looms in the tense spy thriller The Courier. Based on fact, it tells the story of America’s most valuable source of information about Russia during this tumultuous period. With nuclear war a real possibility, a high stakes cat-and-mouse game plays out. Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) is a high-ranking Russian official. But…
– Six Minutes to Midnight – Only in cinemas from 22 April 2021 We have 10 double in-season passes thanks to Transmission Films. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE Summer 1939, Hitler’s power is growing and tensions between the UK and Germany are at boiling point. The Augusta Victoria College, a finishing…
Laura Purcell’s debut, The Silent Companions was a creepy gothic thriller. That book featured everything a reader might want from this style of tale – asylums, strange villagers, a dark manor house, whispers of witchcraft and of course the titular Companions – wooden effigies that seemed to move on their own. She followed that up…
In Sean Durkin’s The Nest, a house of cards is waiting to come tumbling down. We’re in Ronald Reagan’s America – specifically 1986. British-born stock trader Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) is having a hard time of it. On the surface all appears peachy. He’s married to an American horse riding instructor, Allison (Carrie Coon). Rory…
