Category: Thriller

INSOMNIA

By Marc S. Sanders

Insomnia is an unusual kind of crazed killer pursuit because the hero is initially implied to be compromised, and before the first act of the picture ends, we see that he truly is not as noble as he is described.  This Christopher Nolan film, one of the few that neither he nor his brother Jonathan wrote, is headlined by three Oscar winners and they beautifully absorb this insightful script from writer Hillary Seitz.

Al Pacino is a celebrated Los Angeles Detective named Will Dormer.  When we see him arriving aboard a propeller plane into the foggy town of Night Mute, Alaska with his partner Hap Eckart (Martin Donovan), he looks weary and worn out.  Greeted with warm welcomes by a fan of his is Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank) and his old friend Chief Nyback (Paul Dooley).  Will has been special requested to investigate the murder of a young girl found in a trash heap, strangled to death.  Happenings like this do not occur often in Night Mute.  So, it is best to use the assistance of an expert.

Right away, Will is ready to get to work by visiting the girl’s boyfriend at school.  What he doesn’t realize is that it is ten o’clock at night. At this time of year, a midnight sun lasts twenty-four hours over this little getaway.  After he’s had a chance to investigate the victim’s body and go over the autopsy notes, the discovery of her bookbag leads to the prime suspect, mystery writer Walter Finch (Robin Williams).  A raid on his home near the beach is initiated and it does not go as planned.  Will screws up while chasing down the guy who gets away. 

While it seems that with some cover up, Will can keep his terrible error in judgment to himself, Walter knows everything. Now, with taunting phone calls in the middle of broad sunlit evenings, Will’s insomnia is becoming a hinderance as he tries to do his job while suppressing his own personal guilt and egregious acts.

The duality of Pacino versus Williams is reminiscent of Eastwood against Malkovich in In The Line Of Fire.  It works very well especially because of the departure that Robin Williams takes from his usual fare.  Ironically, he portrayed another creepy guy in the year of this release with a movie called One Hour Photo.  Williams is just a different kind of cut from Al Pacino and that’s why their conflict works well.  Pacino’s gruff tone, which is all too familiar within the second half of his career, has a roughness against the smooth and calm demeanor that Robin Williams relies on with his dialogue.  Walter Finch appears relaxed, rested and neat.  Will Dormer is wrinkled, tired, and lonely with guilt.  This killer has an inescapable edge over the cop, and thus Insomnia stands apart from the other fare of its time from the likes of Fincher, Demme or the Scott brothers’ respective films.

Christopher Nolan captures a creepy and uncomfortable setting for an environment bright with daylight amid a corner of the world that still embraces the nature of Earth.  He is thorough explorer with his go-to director of photography, Wally Pfister.  Clouds and the blurs of fogs keep moments unclear.  The sun blaring through windows is disorienting.  You can also feel the chill of Alaska, even if you are like me and have never visited the state. 

Though the film was primarily shot in Canada, there are amazing bluish/white overhead shots of snow-capped mountains and expansive rocky lakes surrounded by green woods.  A foot chase midway through the picture uses this unusual environment as Dormer chases after Finch across an expanse of floating logs that trap him underwater.  As Pacino desperately looks for an opening to the surface, Nolan really makes you feel like you are drowning amid this unexpected trap.  (Try to watch Insomnia on with at least a 5.0 surround sound.)

Hilary Swank’s role appears like a forgettable partner early on, but her significance opens up later in the story as more is revealed.  I look at her character of Ellie and it occurs to me that a theme of mentorship builds the backdrop of Insomnia.  Ellie has studied Will’s most famous cases and he’s much like a celebrity in her presence.  Finch is a well-known author that built a connection with the murder victim who avidly read his novels.  This film is a good reference to the adage that perhaps it is best to never meet your heroes.

I was very surprised by the directions that Insomnia takes, and quite early on.  There are unexpected moments that occur very quickly after the exposition is covered.  Nolan’s film is not a carbon copy of the tough cop working to nab the intelligent killer that’s on the loose.  Bodies do not just turn up before the final showdown, and the office Captain does not unleash on the detective threatening to pull him from this case.  What you observe in Insomnia is not what you have seen a thousand times before. 

Will Dormer is in an unsolvable conundrum of doing the right thing, but can he afford to surrender to his own misgivings after a decorated thirty-year career?  I could not predict how he would get himself out of this situation where Walter Finch, his antagonist, has got the clear advantage. 

Insomnia is a well thought out script superbly brought to vision by Christopher Nolan.  A thinker’s thriller.

NOTE: It’s a nice touch to call Pacino’s character “Dormer” which in French and Latin means “to sleep.”

FOLLOWING

By Marc S. Sanders

A young filmmaker scraped up six thousand dollars to make a short movie clocking in at just over an hour called Following.  The writer/director is Christopher Nolan.  While he may have been very limited on resources, his reach for imagination was already infinite at the start of his career.  Following is…well…challenging to follow, and I had to watch it twice to grasp the novel curves in time jumps and twists.  However, on my second go round I enthusiastically applaud its brilliance.  The wrap up to this short film is genius.

Gone for nearly fifty years, Alfred Hitchcock’s attempts at pursuing the questionable temptations that people undergo remain wholly intriguing.  His movies are still watched, studied, referenced, and duplicated.  Most importantly, they inspire filmmakers like Christopher Nolan.  Following leaps into its story with parallels from Rear Window and then segues into brief encounters like Strangers On A Train commits.  Mischief is at play which gradually develops into deceit and maybe murder.

Nolan makes an hour and ten minutes feel like a breezy fast moving two hours.  The script for Following throws a lot of information at you at a fast pace, which is something the famed director continued to do with the majority of his later films.  It’s to your advantage to stay alert and explore what’s shown in every frame.  Much of what comes at you will circle back for a twist or two.

Bill (Jeremy Theobold) is an unemployed writer who occupies his time by simply shadowing random people going about their lives within the streets of London.  There’s no particular reason for his behavior.  He relays to an older man that perhaps he’ll learn or become inspired by what he sees people do during their day-to-day business.  

A man in a suit carrying a large tote bag (Alex Haw) becomes Bill’s latest observation.  Bill keeps his distance and follows the man into a cafe.  As the man gets up to leave, he makes a surprising stop at Bill’s table.  He calls himself Cobb, and he has an unusual habit of his own.

Cobb demonstrates to Bill how he takes interest in learning about random people by entering their flats when they are not home.  He’s not there to necessarily burglarize.  Though he will tease the owners by planting a pair of women’s panties in their laundry or emptying their little box of knick knacks on the desk.  Maybe he’ll hide one earring to turn up later. In particular, he shows Bill how much you can learn about people by looking at how they keep their home, what they collect or what they furnish the place with.  So, how about the gentlemen pop the cork on a bottle of wine and have a chat while they stay a while.

These two strangers build a warped kind of mentality for this behavior, but as Bill becomes more natural at what Cobb has introduced him to, so do the risks become more apparent.

Following has some unusual ideas; the kind that are perverted enough to only see in the movies.  If I were to meet guys like Bill or Cobb at a bar and they started telling me of their derring do, I might excuse myself as subtly as possible.  In Christopher Nolan’s film though, I’m intrigued of what these men gain or how they entrap themselves.  

On occasion, it is hard to follow where the film turns its attention.  There are time jumps that come out of nowhere.  We see Bill with a different haircut.  At another time he has cuts on his face.  His wardrobe is different. Because of the small budget, the editing and cinematography must have suffered making these time jumps feel seamless.  So, on my first watch I was confused and wondered if the movie had some scenes cut or if I dozed off while watching it.  Then again, this is Christopher Nolan who is notorious for not keeping a straight and narrow narrative.  His well-known movies like Memento, Interstellar or Oppenheimer have all of his best tools at play to emulate different periods of time.  Following is presented in black and white and so it’s a challenge to focus on where you are in the story and where you left off.

The second time I watched the movie, it was much clearer to bridge everything together and you recognize when one twist occurs at the halfway mark followed by something else until it reaches its fascinating conclusion where every prop you see or line that was uttered serves their ulterior motives.

Following is a thrilling play on your thought process where one character might be performing a cruel sleight of hand on another.  Do not trust anything you see or hear.

Currently, Following is on You Tube and streaming on TUBI, but I had to watch with some limited commercial interruptions.  I encourage you to deal with it because Christopher Nolan’s first film shows some of the storytelling tricks he’s most appreciated for.  What you see in Memento, The Prestige or Inception was attempted early on with Following.  It was not as flashy, but it was just as inventive and brainy.

At just over an hour, Following is that perfect story to watch just after you’ve crawled under the covers and turned off the lights.  It’s a thrilling bedtime story.

TIGHTROPE

By Marc S. Sanders

The most recognizable cop Clint Eastwood portrayed is of course Dirty Harry Callahan, San Francisco’s finest.  Tightrope introduces a different kind of policeman though.  Wes Block covers New Orleans, and he balances the seedy underworld of crime in and around the French Quarter while being a single dad to two preteen daughters (the elder one played by Eastwood’s real life child Alison Eastwood).

There’s a serial killer on the loose whose victims of choice are ladies who work in the sex industry.  A skeleton in Wes’ closet is his penchant for getting involved in the world of kinky sex for satisfaction.  This killer seems to follow closely behind Wes’ investigation and his personal trysts.  Best he knows about this creep is he wears tennis shoes and he’s likely a Caucasian.  If Wes didn’t know any better, he could be as likely a suspect as the mayor.

Tightrope is a surprising film considering Eastwood’s resume in the nineteen seventies through eighties.  Usually, his tough, quiet persona never emulated weakness or questionable morals pertaining to rough sexual treatment of women.  Tightrope is not an action picture, but it implies ugly portraits of victimization for women.  It does not hold back on the nudity or the peril that the killer’s victims find themselves in.  It’s an uneasy crime thriller that does not compromise.  

On the flip side of Wes Block’s kinky obsessions is a genuine relationship he begins with a woman named Beryl (Geneviève Bujold). She specializes in helping women protect themselves from rape attacks as well as recovery.  The two have a good chemistry that begins with different interests with sex crimes. Later, they find a mutual appreciation for one another.  Wes might carry shame and fault, but considering Beryl’s background she might be the only grown woman who understands his personal demons.

What I like about this section of the story is that Wes and Beryl’s relationship does not rush itself.  He has an armor that covers his weakness.  She has a bold strength and will not be intimidated.  In order for them to connect, they’ll need to alter their nature when it comes to affection and respect.

There’s also a good dynamic with the two daughters.  To watch Clint Eastwood try to maintain composure while explaining a hard on to his youngest daughter is both hilarious but also stands for another conflict for this protagonist with a checkered background.  This is a different kind comedy routine than his prior connections with an orangutan or a bulldog named Meat Head.

I like that his older daughter played by Alison Eastwood offers empathy with little dialogue.  A great moment has her lie down on her father’s back while he’s in an anguished, drunken stupor. A young girl lending comfort to her pained father.

Eastwood lends a convincing portrayal of guy dealing with personal torment as both a parent and a cop.  The more he digs into what makes this psycho tick the more he seems to endanger what could be another victim for prey and even his own children, plus Beryl.

Writer/director Richard Tuggle captures great location shots of New Orleans along Bourbon Street and within the French Quarter, sometimes celebratory and frequently frighteningly lurid.  Jazz trumpets deliver an atmospheric soundtrack.  A lot of cuts, edits and photographic shots seem reminiscent of Eastwood’s techniques. It would not be surprising, especially since he’s a producer, if he sat in the chair behind the camera to bring the film to completion.

Tightrope is a slow burn potboiler with convincingly ugly material.  It’s disturbing but wholly engaging with different reasons for a familiar Clint Eastwood to quietly brood.  The suspense and frustration build as the danger heightens.  This is the kind of movie you watch after midnight when the rest of the household has gone to bed.

ABSOLUTE POWER

By Marc S. Sanders

As Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power was unfolding I started to think this plays like one of those hardcover bestseller political thrillers from the 90s that my dad would scoop up off of the neatly designed stack at the front of Barnes & Noble.  You know with the glossy book jacket that has the blood stain and a dead girl’s nail polished hand next to a bloody letter opener.  The graphics are elevated to feel the crime scene with your fingertips.  The intrigue is summed up on the inside tab.  You turn to the back of the book to see the picture of the author.  Then you buy it with your membership card.  Go figure!  William Goldman adapted the screenplay from a novel by renowned author David Baldacci. Absolute Power has an engaging set up, a who’s who of a cast, it’s directed, produced and starring Eastwood. Still, it evolves into utter eye-rolling preposterousness.

Eastwood directs his own portrayal Luther Whitney, an expert jewel thief.  He might be getting up there in age but he scopes out the mansion of a billionaire tycoon (E.G Marshall, in his final on-screen role) and locates the vault hidden behind a large two-way mirror.  Everything is going to plan as Luther bags up the valuables and a lot of cash but then a drunken couple enter with Luther hidden behind the mirror to watch their tryst turn deadly.  The President of the United States (Gene Hackman) avoids being stabbed to death by the young lady (Melora Hardin) when his secret service detail (Scott Gleen and Dennis Haysbert) enter to shoot the girl dead.  The President’s Chief of Staff (Judy Davis) arrives soon after.  Luther observes the four as they rush the Commander In Chief out of the house and alter the crime scene.  They get careless and just as Luther makes a quick exit, he retrieves evidence that will hopefully work to his advantage.  Now he’s in danger of the President and the other three as they work to permanently contain the situation.

Elsewhere is Ed Harris as the detective out to solve the murder and uncover everything we already know.  When he realizes a thief must have been at the scene of the crime, he actually approaches Luther for some guidance as to who could have been there.  Later, he will use Laura Linney, playing Luther’s daughter, for assistance as her father seems to be the prime suspect. 

The tycoon, the President’s biggest supporter, also wants to resolve his personal vendetta by hiring his own sniper (Richard Jenkins) to take out Luther. 

Absolute Power has all of these players, with recognizable actors in the roles, and yet cannot work the magic necessary to fix this outrageous conundrum.  I can believe that a President could get in more trouble than he needs with a one-night stand and a dead girl on the floor.  I can believe members of his staff will work to tie off all the loose ends, even if it means more murder and mayhem must occur. 

What is hard to swallow is how neatly the story wraps up literally within one afternoon leading into an evening.  It’s fortunate that window washers are present to throw off a couple of snipers with an inconvenient glare at the most inopportune time.  Otherwise, there will be no more movie.  It helps that a character with remorse happens to take his own life, thus exposing the conspiracy, just as Eastwood’s character is steering his own way to exoneration.  All in the same night!!!!

To ramp up the suspense, the bad guys go after Linney’s character, the one person Luther cares for the most.  She ends up in a hospital.  Message has been sent.  Luther better surrender himself along with what he knows to the President’s squad.  Yet, they try one more time to permanently eliminate her and I asked why.  What purpose does that serve to kill her now?  If you kill her, then Luther has nothing to protect or care about anymore.  He can just reveal the entire breakdown of what really happened complete with evidence and so on.

A few years earlier, Eastwood starred in In The Line Of Fire where John Malkovich played a master of disguise assassin.  Luther is also a craftsman at hiding in plain sight.  However, there’s no way I can believe that.  We are looking at Clint Eastwood here.  He’s got his own unique and very tall and square stature.  Put a white mustache and a pair of glasses on the guy, and it is still Clint Eastwood.  Put a hat and beard on him and it is still Clint Eastwood.  Wrap him up in a trench coat and have him walk the city streets in broad daylight where fifty cops are awaiting his arrival and you’ll be able to see the one and only Clint Eastwood.  It just can’t work.  James Bond can hide in disguise.  John Malkovich can hide in disguise.  Go anywhere in the world and Shaquille O’Neal and Clint Eastwood would never be hidden in plain sight. 

William Goldman (The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid) is one of Hollywood’s most celebrated screenwriters.  He did not think this story all the way through.  You may believe Gene Hackman (second billing behind Eastwood) would have had more of a presence in this picture but oddly enough he’s hardly there. The real bad guy roles belong to Judy Davis and Scott Glenn who are not nearly as exciting as what Hackman could have delivered.

There was a potential for a good conspiracy thriller. The problem is the audience knows too much following the first fifteen minutes of the film.  We know everything that happened and therefore I could care less about the progress that Ed Harris’ detective makes.  Absolute Power likely would have performed better had it opened after the crime had occurred.  Run the opening credits over the dead girl in the room and open the two-way mirror for Luther to enter the frame.  He makes a run for it and then the film can gradually reveal what precisely happened.  A mystery for the characters and the audiences who are watching them only works if the questions are offered before the answers are revealed.

Absolute Power offered a lot of promise with a lot of talent but it’s devoid of both.

SINNERS (2025)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ryan Coogler
CAST: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, Jack O’Connell
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that even greater troubles are waiting to welcome them back home.


“You keep dancin’ with the devil…one day he’s gonna follow you home.” – Jedidiah in Sinners

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners pulls one of the best head-fakes I’ve seen in a long time.  The initial trailers would have had you believe the film was basically a character study (albeit an intense one) of identical twin brothers trying to run an illegal business in 1932 Mississippi.  Since both brothers are being played by the excellent Michael B. Jordan, aided by a stellar supporting cast, I got the impression it would be a hybrid of Heat, The Cotton Club, and Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.

Sinners does cover much of that fertile ground…for its first half.  Read no further if you’ve been lucky enough not to have seen what the main attraction is, plot-wise, for the film.

We first get a prologue depicting a bloodied young black man bursting into a Sunday church service while holding the top half of a broken guitar neck.  This is Sammie Moore, played by Miles Caton in his film debut.  The rest of the film is a flashback to the previous day.

The Smokestack brothers have returned home.  Smoke and Stack are identical twins, although one of them (Smoke, I think?) has some visible gold in his smile, so that helps distinguish them from each other.  They are both sharply dressed, having returned from Chicago after working for Al Capone for a spell.  They plan to open a juke joint in a building they purchased from a smarmy character named Hogwood, a white man who grins and assures them they won’t have any trouble from the Klan ‘round here.

This whole first half of the movie is masterfully told.  We are presented with fully drawn characters, not generic placeholders to be shuffled randomly later on.  We find out that Sammie is cousin to Smoke and Stack.  We meet Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a mixed-race woman who was left high and dry romantically when Smoke left for Chicago.  There’s Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a nearly-ancient man who plays a mean blues harmonica, whom the brothers want to hire to play in their new joint.  There are the Asian owners of a grocery store, hired to cater their grand opening.

And then there’s actress Wunmi Mosaku, who gives a luminous, heartbreaking performance as Annie, a woman who bore Smoke a child that died as an infant.  One of the highlights of the film shows Smoke reconnecting with Annie in a scene that at first invites some crude jokes, but which later provides a deep emotional resonance in the movie’s closing passages.  I only remember Mosaku as a sizable presence in the one-and-done HBO series Lovecraft Country (2020), but she was also apparently in Deadpool and Wolverine (2024), so now I gotta go back and watch THAT again.  Twist my arm.

The movie plays more like a really good Stephen King novel than any other movie I can think of since Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).  The film’s canvas is painted beautifully and crisply, moving smartly without rushing.  I would hope Sinners gets nominated for its film editing (provided by Michael P. Shawver), not because of the thrilling later sections, but because of how economically the first half of the film provides us with the perfect amount of information to understand everyone’s motivations when the second half arrives, when all hell breaks loose.

I must also mention the film’s, I guess, “mystical” content when it comes to African American history.  Early on, Annie, who is a “hoodoo” practitioner (I don’t think “witch” is the right word here), tells a lovely story about how, every once in a while, a musician comes along who can play so beautifully that their music “pierces the veil” between past, present, and future, inviting the spirits of all three to come together and enjoy the music as one.  There is a magnificent sequence where we get a visual representation of exactly that when Sammie starts to play the blues in the juke joint.  Trying to describe it in print is a fool’s errand, but it is one of the film’s many visual highlights.  Trust me.  You’ll know it when you see it.  It’s as elegant a representation of Black history as I’ve ever seen, and I don’t know how anyone will be able to top it in the future.

All of that, though, is just prologue for the main event: the vampires.  If you’ve read this long and didn’t know that was coming, I’m sorry I spoiled that for you, but you were warned.

The whole second half of Sinners flirts with becoming a straight-up genre picture, which is not a bad thing in itself, but which would have been almost disappointing when stacked against what came before.  However, because we have been given such a thorough grounding in all the characters beforehand, there are real stakes involved in trying to predict who will live and who will die.  Some deaths are almost foregone conclusions, but even those are more affecting than they would have been in other similar films.

Traditional vampire lore is very much at play, especially the bit about having to be invited into a house.  But the filmmakers did add one new bit, which I thought was EXTREMELY effective.  As a vampire is about to feed (or thinks it’s about to), it begins to drool…a thick, gooey saliva that drips from its mouth like ectoplasm.  This is a cool touch, and it makes perfect sense, a Pavlovian response to an imminent meal.  Don’t be surprised if another vampire film in the future steals that from Sinners.  I’d steal it.  Wouldn’t think twice about it.

Sinners undoubtedly has some deeper meanings that I am not qualified to unpack, and I leave it to you to find them.  This is one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and it is deservedly making bank at the box office.  (Over $200 million globally as of May 3rd, 2025.)  It is surprising, it is dramatic, it is thrilling, and it is worth seeing on the big screen.  Trust me.

SILKWOOD (1983)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Mike Nichols
CAST: Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, Cher, Craig T. Nelson, Fred Ward, Ron Silver, Bruce McGill, David Strathairn, M. Emmet Walsh, James Rebhorn
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 77% Fresh

PLOT: On November 13, 1974, Karen Silkwood, an employee of a nuclear facility, left to meet with a reporter from the New York Times. She never got there.


The tagline for Silkwood (quoted above) almost feels like it gives the game away, but it doesn’t really.  Even if Karen Silkwood’s name isn’t exactly part of the cultural zeitgeist anymore, I am willing to bet that a lot of people know what her name signifies in one way or another.  So, it’s not like the movie’s poster or trailers are spoiling what happens at the end of the film because most of us know.

In any event, Mike Nichols’ film isn’t a nuclear-based thriller, like The Day After (1983) or WarGames (1984), that depends on an unexpected resolution.  Silkwood isn’t about theatrical heroics or bombastic personalities.  It’s a quietly intense character study of an everywoman with an untidy personal life who experiences a seismic shift in her perception and decides she simply can’t stand by and do nothing.  This isn’t a crowd-pleaser like Erin Brockovich (2000), but this film’s story and central character are no less important.

The film goes to great pains to show us how ordinary and messy Karen Silkwood is.  The incidents at the Oklahoma nuclear facility where she works (along with her live-in boyfriend, Drew, and her roommate, Dolly) are almost secondary to the plot, at least for the first half of the film.  Karen has kids that live with her ex-husband and his girlfriend in Texas.  Her relationship with Drew isn’t stormy, but it’s not perfect.  Dolly seems tolerable as a roommate, but is not shy about speaking her mind.  Dolly brings a girlfriend home one night, and there is a slyly amusing conversation between Karen and Drew about Dolly’s sexual preferences.  (“I can handle it.”  “Me, too.”  “…so why are we talking about it?”)

I don’t want to go into too many details about the true-life incidents that occurred at the facility where Karen worked because, if you’re not intimately familiar with the facts of the story, they should be as surprising to you as they were to me.  Plutonium is involved, but probably not in the way you’re thinking.  Karen learns enough to know she should be more involved in the factory’s union…a LOT more.  One plot thread almost feels like it’s ripped off from The China Syndrome (1979), until you realize Syndrome was released four years after the events of Silkwood, so if anything, Syndrome was probably inspired by Karen’s discoveries.

I also have to mention Cher as the roommate, Dolly.  Of course, Meryl Streep is amazing and convincing as an everyday, average divorced mom, but Cher more than holds her own in every scene.  There is absolutely no hint of the pop music megastar of the ‘70s in this film.  Director Mike Nichols insisted she wear little or no makeup in her scenes, which went against every fiber of her instinct as a performer.  She understood the assignment: she never upstages anyone.  This is not a grandstanding kind of supporting role, like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive (1993) or Cate Blanchett in The Aviator (2004).  It required subtlety and understatement, and Cher delivered.  I tried to spot her “acting,” and I never could.  She was unbelievably natural and, at times, heartbreaking.  The movie is almost worth searching out just to see her performance.  It’s a clinic in how to own a small role and make it stand out by doing less than you might expect.

Silkwood may not feel as thrilling as some of the other thrillers I’ve already mentioned, but it is just as compelling, specifically because we’re watching an ordinary person under extraordinary circumstances.  We’re not watching a hero triumphantly rise to the occasion.  We’re watching a struggling divorcee who’s trying to do the right thing after years of inaction, even if it means losing the trust of her co-workers or sacrificing her other personal relationships.  I identified more with Karen Silkwood and her situation than I did with Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome or Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich. 

The ambiguous nature of the film’s ending mirrors what happened in real life, and when the credits rolled, I felt a surge of empathy for the people left behind and the unanswered questions they live with to this day.  That doesn’t happen to me very often.

FALL

By Marc S. Sanders

Sometimes a movie will simply cover a circumstance.  The crew of Apollo 13 end up lost in space.  James Franco gets trapped behind a rock for 127 Hours.  Chrissy Watkins and Alex Kintner wind up abandoned in shark infested Open Water.  I recall Ryan Reynolds being buried alive in a coffin for ninety minutes.  Haven’t seen that one yet.  Not interested, honestly.  

Any of you curious to see what happens when two expert rock climbers neither of whom wear safety gloves, while one wears Converse All Star high tops, (Pass the grain of salt, please!) opt to climb a rusty 2,049-foot-high television antenna and get stuck at the top?  That’s about all there is to Fall, directed by Scott Mann.  

Granted, there is a thin slice of characterization layered on the crust.  Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) is severely depressed and maybe suicidal following a rock-climbing accident that took her beloved husband Dan (Mason Gooding) away from her.  Fifty-one weeks later, she still defies her father’s (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) pleas to help her.  Yet, her best friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner) urges Becky to accompany her while she records their climb up the infamous B-67 TV Tower, located in the Mojave Desert.  Hunter’s thousands of online followers will be in awe!

Subtle beats of conversation show that Hunter may be hiding a secret from Becky.  Frankly, if you’ve at least read a Dr. Seuss book, you’ll be much more intuitive than Becky, and know what the secret is.  So why should I waste the keystrokes spelling it out for you?

The climb up is pretty unchallenging as the young ladies are tethered together by about fifty feet of climbing rope.  The photography will dazzle you though. They’ve got their cell phones and a drone for some masterful sights of the wide expanse of desert and unlimited blue sky.  One water bottle between the two should be enough. The vultures are nothing to worry about as they are feasting on a near dead coyote down below.  Only thing is that we know something the girls don’t.  As the ascent gets higher into the upwards void, the frailer the rusted ladder becomes, and the more bolts and beams pop off.  You can guess what happens next and follow the film all the way down to its end.

What saves Fall from being a waste of time is Scott Mann’s use of his camera.  IMDb states that he insisted on not doing green screen work.  If he was going to be this daring, the climb up and the need for the ladies to hold out on a grilled, narrow platform high above had to be as authentically real as possible.  Mann’s team built a duplicate antenna on the top of a high mountain location, that reached as close to the structure’s actual height as possible.  So, the height matches that of the real structure.  The recreated antenna was apparently shorter though.  Hey, I was convinced of everything I was looking at from a scorching sun to heavy breezes to sunburns and running mascara and the eventual exhaustion, fear and despair the girls had to endure while trying to survive close falls and drops.  

The edits will make shout and gasp as one of the girls slips or barely holds on to a bar or rope or hand that could give way.  It’s not as impressive as some of the material in Cliffhanger.  Remember that opening?  The enormity of the elevation also does not compare to what Robert Zemeckis did across the open chasm between the World Trade Center Towers either (The Walk).  However, there’s much to look at and take in with a strong sense of vertigo and shortness of breath.

Becky and Hunter’s dilemma left me with trying to figure how they’ll get out this scenario.  You account for what they climbed up with and what might be at the top of the pole for them to use.  You also consider the injuries they suffer when they attempt a risk at gaining an advantage.  Most of what is tried seems apparent.  Though I question their short cut knowledge for charging a cell phone or drone battery.  

I was skeptical of their plight as well.  Expert climbers would wear gloves while climbing a rock or an old rusty two thousand foot high ladder.  Converse sneakers with no tread on the soles? C’mon!  As well, this giant, narrow thing is erect in the middle of the scorching, desert sun.  These girls ever experience going down an aluminum playground slide?  My hands were burning just looking at every rickety piece of this thing.  How did Becky and Hunter avoid painful skin tears and callouses? How did they not have any sort of involuntary reflex against touching what should be burning hot, rusted metal?

Despite the unnecessary, or maybe neglected liberties, the film takes, Fall is watchable. Just take your bathroom breaks during the two “it’s only a nightmare” scenes that look lifted straight out of Jaws: The Revenge. When will filmmakers realize how stupid and unnecessary an “it’s only a nightmare” scene is? The only time it worked was in Aliens. Beyond that, this stale uncreative kind of filler is there simply to muster a jump scare that does not advance a character or teeter a plot. Just stop with the nonsense.

Fall offers a situation I never want to end up in.  I’ve actually developed a fear of heights as I’ve gotten older.  Yet, I’d love to observe from the safety of my home theater how others like Becky and Hunter respond.  The ending is acceptable with a mild twist.  I think I would have embraced this fictional circumstance much more had the story been more frank with itself and the characters who were selected to play this foolhardy game.

One thing I’ve learned though. Nursery rhymes will not help you get your mind off the heights. Thing about what happened to Humpty Dumpty, or if we all play Ring Around The Rosie. Yikes!!!!!!!

TWILIGHT’S LAST GLEAMING (1977)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Robert Aldrich
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Charles Durning, Richard Widmark, Paul Winfield, Burt Young, Melvyn Douglas, Joseph Cotten, Richard Jaeckel, John Ratzenberger
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 80% Fresh

PLOT: A renegade USAF general takes over an ICBM silo and threatens to provoke World War III unless the President reveals details of a secret meeting held just after the start of the Vietnam War.


Twilight’s Last Gleaming, one of Robert Aldrich’s last films, is a cleverly constructed Cold War thriller whose pointed message about the Vietnam War nearly torpedoes the suspense.  The political message is hammered home in a scene that goes on for a bit too long with people speaking dialogue that feels hammy and trite.  But the movie surrounding this one scene is good enough that I would still recommend it to anyone in the market for something off the beaten track.

The movie is set in 1981, four years after it was released, so no one could draw any real-life parallels between the characters and people in real life.  In an opening sequence that feels reminiscent of Die Hard (1988), General Lawrence Dell (Burt Lancaster) and his team of military ex-cons manage to infiltrate and take command of a US ICBM missile silo in Montana.  While I highly doubt it would be as easy as portrayed in the film, Aldrich films the sequence so that I got caught up in the suspense of the narrative instead of worrying about pesky details.  (If there’s a drawback to these and other sequences featuring military hardware and installations, it’s the overall low-budget feel to the sets and props; everything looks like it was shot on a TV soundstage instead of a big-budget film set.)

Once inside, Dell makes his demands: $20 million for each of his remaining team (Burt Young and Paul Winfield), the President must read the transcript of a secret meeting held just after the Vietnam war started, and the President must hand himself over as a hostage to secure their escape.  Otherwise, he’ll launch nine Titan ICBMs at their targets.

This creates a little tension among the would-be terrorists.  Winfield and Young couldn’t care less about the secret meeting, but Dell is adamant.  Meanwhile, General MacKenzie (Richard Widmark) formulates a plan to eliminate Dell and his crew using a “tiny” nuclear device, the President (Charles Durning) agonizes over the secret transcript, and his best friend and aide uses some “tough love” to get him to make a decision.

Despite the fakeness of the surroundings, I was absorbed by the thriller elements in Twilight’s Last Gleaming.  I would compare them to the best parts of WarGames (1983) and The China Syndrome (1979).  There is some impressively impenetrable technobabble about booby traps and inhibitor cables and fail-safe systems that I just rolled with.  The plan involving that “tiny” nuclear device leads up to a sequence that I would compare favorably with any contemporary thriller you can name.

One of the ways Aldrich achieves this effect is through the use of split-screens…LOTS of split-screens.  It starts at the beginning of the film with two screens.  Then there are moments with three split screens, two on top and one in the bottom section.  Then, during the most intense sequence of the film, we get four splits in each corner of the screen.  At first, I found it disorienting, but it absolutely works when it most needs to.  (I’m trying not to give away too many plot details, so excuse the vagueness.)  I don’t know that I would want to watch an entire movie like this (Timecode, 2000), but in small doses, it’s very effective.

Where the movie bogs down is the middle section of the film when the President expresses his disapproval of the contents of the secret transcript Dell wants publicized.  It’s a bit theatrical to believe a sitting American President would be this vocal about his feelings in the middle of a dire crisis.  I think the scene would have played just as well if we had gotten a general idea of the transcript, or even if the contents had NEVER been revealed to the audience.  It would have been a perfect Macguffin, leaving viewers free to imagine anything they want.  The truth about Kennedy’s assassination?  Area 51?  Pearl Harbor was an inside job?  The Super Bowl really IS fixed?  Who knows?

Instead, the President insists on reading a portion of it out loud to his Cabinet members, enlisting them to read certain lines.  While I admire Aldrich’s intent (to send a cinematic protest to the architects of the Vietnam war), the scene nearly brought the movie to a stop, which is deadly when dealing with a suspense thriller.

But, like I said, the rest of the movie is so good, I am compelled to let it slide.  Later, we get surprise attacks, snipers, helicopters, a crafty fake-out involving torture, and an ending that is as cynical as they come, but which felt like the best way out of the situation for everyone involved…except for the American people, but that’s another story.  Twilight’s Last Gleaming feels virtually forgotten, and that’s a shame.  Aldrich directs this movie with a lot of passion for the material and milks every ounce of suspense he can with the tools at hand.  If you’re prepared to overlook that middle section, you’ll get a kick out of this movie.

P.S. Look fast for an unexpected appearance by William Hootkins, aka “Porkins” from Star Wars (1977).

SEPTEMBER 5 (Germany, 2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Tim Fehlbaum
CAST: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, the ABC Sports broadcasting team must adapt to providing live coverage of Israeli athletes being held hostage by a terrorist group.


Two of my absolute favorite true-life movies (United 93 [2006], Bloody Sunday [2002]) happen to be from the same director, Paul Greengrass.  Watching Tim Fehlbaum’s film September 5 felt at times like I was watching a Paul Greengrass film, and I can offer no higher compliment than that.  From the moment the first gunshots are heard coming from the Olympic village in Munich in the wee morning hours of September 5, 1972, this movie never lets up on the tension.  Over the next 24 hours, we will follow the ABC Sports broadcasting team as the managers and crew work through a tangle of journalistic ethics and operational logistics to report on the biggest news story of their lives while maintaining objectivity and their obligation to the truth, and ALSO keeping the safety of the victims and their families in mind.

The four major characters are legendary ABC Sports executive Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard); a then-unknown control-room functionary, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), who was in the right place at the wrong time; ABC Sports producer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin); and German-to-English translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), who is probably an amalgam of several different people who were most likely present during the actual events of the film.

One of the masterstrokes of September 5 is how it rachets up the tension by staying inside the claustrophobic control room and connected offices for the entire film, minus the opening and closing shots showing Geoff arriving for work and leaving the next morning.  Anything showing us the outside world is only visible on the banks of television monitors in front of them, which leads to much confusion towards the end of the film as reports of the Israeli hostages being freed begin circulating, but no one can actually see what the hell is going on.  This is one of the ways the film reminded me of some of the best scenes in United 93 when the people responsible for making the most crucial decisions of their lives were limited by what they could see and hear on the news.

I have never worked in a TV studio, but this movie carries a palpable authenticity that made me believe everything I was seeing.  I never knew, for example, that chyrons (those small captions on the bottom of a TV screen during the news) were analog back in 1972.  Whenever a new development occurs, the control room has to call up a woman in a completely separate room/mini-studio so she can manually place individual letters onto a physical message board, then get behind a camera and shoot the image so it can be superimposed back in the main control room.  Exhausting!

Peter Jennings is reporting remotely across the street from the Israeli apartments, but he cannot be heard live from his radio into the audio feed for the TV signal.  So, some random dude takes a phone handset, unscrews it, solders some wires, clamps it all together in front of a microphone, and presto, now Jennings is live.  The whole operation is put together with spit and baling wire.  It feels like it’s a miracle that anything was televised at all.

The other conflicts presented to us are no less important.  Marianne, a German woman, is drafted into helping with the translation, but first she must endure some brief accusations from Marvin.  The fact these Olympics are being held in Munich less than thirty years after the end of World War II is something many people are still coming to terms with.  He asks her if her parents knew about the concentration camps.  She stares for a second and gives the best answer possible: “But I am not them.”  After that, she earns the complete trust of the entire staff.

The subtext of the German guilt over World War II is bubbling just beneath the surface for the entire film.  A German maintenance worker won’t release replacement cables to a French tech until Marianne talks him into it.  It is theorized at one point that German military forces could possibly end the hostage situation within minutes, but the German military is constitutionally forbidden to operate within the Olympic village, for obvious reasons.  Roone Arledge watches Mark Spitz win yet another gold medal, and instead of going to a closeup of Spitz, he instructs the cameraman to cut to the face of the German swimmer who lost.  Someone asks him, “Do you really want to bring politics into this?”  And he replies, “It’s not about politics, it’s about emotions.”

Which brings in the other major point of retelling this story in this way.  There is a point where ABC’s cameras have great shots of the building, the balcony, and the entire complex, and they are broadcasting live (the first time the Olympics had been broadcast live, by the way).  Someone spots German policemen – non-military – getting into position with sniper rifles.  Marianne hears chatter on the police band about an operation getting the green light.  The press is ordered out of the area, but ABC’s cameras continue to broadcast live.  Someone notices that a TV appears to be on inside the apartment where the hostages are being held.  Geoff suddenly asks a reasonable question: “Are the terrorists seeing this?”  Minutes later, German police storm the ABC control room and demand the cameras be turned off, pointing a gun at the crew at one point.  The cameras get turned off and a furious Arledge kicks the Germans out of the building, but the point is made.  Minutes later, the operation is called off. 

“They should’ve cut the electricity to the apartment, it’s not up to us to double-check on them,” says Marv.  But Geoff makes a point: “Marv, it’s not okay if we made it worse.”  The fine line between the freedom of the press and general public safety could not be more elegantly portrayed than it is here.  Earlier in the film, just as the cameras have been set up with shots of the balcony of the apartment, someone asks, “Black September [the terrorist group responsible], they know the whole world is watching, right? …if they shoot someone on live television, whose story is that?  Is it ours, or is it theirs?”

It seems like an easy question to answer: “Public safety comes first.”  But who gets to decide what’s in the public’s best interest?  Those policemen who burst into the control room and shut the cameras off at gunpoint?  Perhaps it should be left to each newsperson’s individual conscience, but can that always be trusted?  These are questions I am not qualified to answer, but I appreciate films like September 5 because they have enough faith in the viewer to pose those questions and then refrain from providing a tidy answer.  It’s one of those rare thrillers that tells a crackling good story and also asks some big, relevant questions that you may not even think about until you’re driving to work the next day.

One of the last things we hear is Marianne talking to Geoff, who had sent her to the German airport where the hostages were supposed to have been flown out of Germany.  “I was there with hundreds of people, we stared into the night.  We were waiting for something to happen because we wanted to take a picture of it.”  While that’s a rather bleak way of describing a profession that has given us some compelling images that have swayed the world’s opinion on vitally important matters, perhaps it’s also a way to caution those who would exploit situations, like the paparazzi who chased Princess Di into that tunnel.

SEPTEMBER 5

By Marc S. Sanders

September 5 is a sweeping account of how breaking news used to be assembled.  You had to be in the right place at the right time.  If you weren’t, then perhaps the sports department of your media conglomerate is, and they will get the story. 

The very first televised terrorist attack was broadcast at a sadly appropriate time.  The 1972 Olympics were being covered by the ABC television network.  For the first time, homes all across the world would be able to watch the games in color, from a satellite feed shared among the big three networks.  ABC had the broadcasting rights to the games though.  The setting is especially interesting to this story.  The Olympics are being hosted by Germany, primarily out of Munich.  This is an opportunity for the country to finally redeem itself, only twenty-seven years after World War II had come to an end and their country’s Nazi regime had been overthrown.  Germany had a lot to make up for.

The Sports Division of ABC news turn over in the wee hours of the morning of September 5.  Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) slumps into the studio and relieves Roone Arlege (Peter Sarsgaard) following long hours of editing and covering competitions in swimming, volleyball, boxing, track and so on.  There’s minimal staff on shift as the athletes and coaches are asleep for the night, but then Geoffrey and crew believe they hear machine gun fire out of the direction of Olympic Park, and suddenly everyone is awakened and scrambling to put together the story fast. 

No other broadcasts are reporting on this alarming incident.  This is a story that comes at ABC Sports in their own time.  Had this happened today, amid an age of worldwide shrinkage with the existence of the internet, these guys would have been way behind.  In 1972 however, they can rely on Mariane Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) a female German flunky of the sports division to translate the various radio communications between the terrorists and the German negotiators, and what plans are being put in place.  Nine Israeli athletes have been taken hostage in their hotel rooms with two believed to have already been killed.  The terrorists (believed to be a Palestinian militia group called Black September) demand that Israel release two hundred of their prisoners or they will kill a hostage every hour beginning at noon.

Forgive the cliché terminology, but September 5 is a taut, nail biting, documentary style thriller told only through the perspective of the ABC Sports division.  While the developments of the hostage situation feel urgent, for these unshaven guys in glasses and wrinkled shirts who are operating on little sleep and a lot of coffee, it is about getting the news out quickly and accurately, and just as importantly, first.  Geoffrey and Roone are constantly on the phones trying to learn whatever they can from Peter Jennings, the eventual famed ABC reporter, who is nearby the incident and at times hiding from the German police who are desperately trying to clear the area of the press.  The guys even send in a staff member with a smuggled camera and reels of film taped to his belly while he poses as an Olympic weightlifter.  The Germans forbid the press from trespassing but insist the games carry on.  So, the athletes and coaches are the only ones who can enter the area to prepare for competitions of the day.  Even Howard Cosell happens to be in a hotel staircase nearby and can provide feedback. 

In the news control room, the guys are literally putting walkie talkies next to microphones that broadcast live on air with Jim McKay who is behind the desk, talking to the world.  This is bare bones news broadcasting with unsophisticated technology to aid them in this short window of time.  The director of this film, Tim Fehlbaum, brilliantly captures the desperate inconveniences of reporting this way. 

Roone and Geoffrey also have to contend within their own ranks.  This is not a sports story.  This is a news story and so Roone must insist on keeping the story.  They are the only ones there.  How much more effective would a news division located on the other side of the world fare?  Therefore, Roone’s team are the only ones qualified to cover this developing story.  ABC News will not have access to this. 

Roone also has to improvise how the satellite feed is shared with their competitor, CBS Sports.  It’s a pain in the ass inconvenience and yet the resourcefulness and quick thinking of the control room staff find a way to uphold their claim on this story.

While watching this account, it matters little if we know the outcome of the September 5, 1972, Munich attack.  This film’s purpose is covering how the first few who knew about the situation responded. By the time the ninety-five-minute film is over a lot has been shared.  Tim Fehlbaum, with an Oscar nominated screenplay written by him along with Moritz Binder cover quite a bit.  The pace moves as fast as these people in the control had to move on that terrible day.  So, the information comes quick.  With real life archived ABC footage spliced within the film, you feel as if you are standing in the corner of this dark room with various tv screens, microphones, and telephones. 

You watch John Magaro feed information to Jim McKay, and then the picture cuts to real life footage of McKay at the desk.  It’s quite inventive how the script is accommodated to work in line with what Jennings, Cosell, McKay and others literally said as the crisis was being reported.

Having seen all ten Best Picture nominees for 2024, it is disappointing that September 5 did not make the cut.  Tim Fehlbaum’s picture certainly deserves more recognition and a slot over other contenders this year.  Still, the screenplay is a well-deserved accolade.  To interweave a fresh script that hinges on what was literally said on television screens around the world at that time is a marvelous strategy. 

September 5 is a crackling thriller of a terribly sad day.