The myth is that the murdered woman was 'a sex worker, a gangster's moll, or a movie extra yearning to become Lana Turner.' In fact, Elizabeth Short was a young woman who wanted to see more of the world than her hometown offered. She had suffered abuse from her father and dreamed of making a new life for herself in Los Angeles.
Memento provides a Rosetta Stone to decode deeper meaning within his larger-scale efforts, offering a window into the complex paradoxes that add thematic weight to his intricately plotted stories. Nolan's films often jump from a familiar genre archetype. In Memento, Guy Pearce's Leonard Shelby recalls the weary antiheroes of film noir, but his filmography is full of familiar figures ranging from superheroes to great men of history.
The first thing you notice about undertone is how quiet it is; not just in its audio mix, but in how it's shot - primarily steady wide shots that slowly pan across empty rooms, allowing your eyes to frantically scan for something amiss. It's an understated form of filmmaking that allows for the movie's scares to hit all that much harder.
If there's anything I miss in pop culture, it's the presence of ordinary movies. I don't mean blockbusters like Avatar or cultural events like Barbenheimer or Oscar contenders like One Battle After Another. I'm talking about the routine, well-made entertainments that, for nearly a century, used to open in theaters every week. You'd go see them because the story sounded good or you liked the stars or you just wanted to enjoy something as part of an audience.
Based on the bestselling book of the same name by Dan Simmons, it chronicles a doomed Royal Navy expedition dispatched to the Arctic in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. Under the leadership of Captains Sir John Franklin and Francis Crozier, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, manned with 129 crew, set sail from England in 1845. They became locked in pack ice off King William Island in the winter of 1846.
Glimpse them chatting in a restaurant or posing on Instagram, and you might think they have it all. The pair live in London but often travel, drawing the eyes of other guests, their skin glowing, their limbs artfully at ease. She writes affirmations on hotel stationery; he claims to taste notes of bark and tobacco in his chianti. As Sean Gilbert's dark, observant debut opens in Istanbul, this apparently perfect couple bicker and sweat, for secrets lurk behind their facade and one of them might be murder.
When the people who are after me get here, they'll arrest me and put me on trial, or they'll disappear me to some black site. Or they won't bother with any of that and they'll just kill me. All of these seem like plausible outcomes, but in the novel's prologue, the narrator seems much more confident of her success: I am a fucking genius, a gorgeous fucking genius, and the only thing left to do is sit down and write.
10 Cloverfield Lane Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr are locked in an underground bunker for the majority of this left-field sequel to Cloverfield, with thrilling results. In the film's final throes, Winstead's character exits the bunker, and finds that her captor was telling the truth about an alien invasion above - a twist that completely and ruinously dissipates the hard-earned tension that came before.
After spotting that Eli's rash guard conceals a red, flaky skin disorder, the boys have concluded that he has the titular plague, a contagious disease that affects social standing as much as it does dermatological well-being. If anyone ever touches him, they must thoroughly wash themselves before they're considered full-blown infected. Even something as innocent as Eli sitting at the same lunch table sends his teammates running and screaming.
A fatally overdosed mother called Jacey is unceremoniously bundled into a trunk at the start of this southern US-set drama; the uncredited actor who plays her should probably have a word with her agent, as the role is surely in contention for a world record as the least likely to boost your career. Jacey is just one of the drug casualties littering director Dan Kay's underpowered film about the US's super-strength opioid crisis, as her two bereaved daughters desperately tread water in the aftermath.