Zain Retherford, Penn State 2. Nevertheless, she has given her heart to him, and both fall in love. The Wailing is the metaphysical mystery that we all wanted from True Detective Season 1. Thank God for the meditative soundtrack. Morgan McIntosh, Penn State 3. It's hard to imagine the longtime Godzilla fan who won't enjoy this latest revisit.
In many ways, Lights Out is a conventional and slightly predictable horror movie, but it's also well written, cleverly shot, and atmospheric the premise demands darkness. While that dawn-of-a-new-century moment is infused with pressing hope, the subsequent development of these men and women's lives—involving marriage, children, divorce, and illness—provides depressing rejoinders to their early optimism. The movie has the dramatic prowess to make it work, swinging from hard laughs -- Common, New Girl's Lamorne Morris, and the fiery Minaj steal the show -- to potent drama. Kusama shrewdly lays out her psychological dynamics, and she imbues her action with an eeriness that suggests there's more to this get-together than initially meets the eye, and which slowly builds to near-unbearable levels. Under the Shadow Set during the conflict between Iran and Iraq, a desperate mother and her horrified little girl find themselves haunted by the ghosts of wartime past. Tapping into history and the terror of true life bombardment, Under the Shadows is one of the smartest, saddest, and most eerily effective horror films of the year.
Earl Hall, Iowa State 8. Kennedy, is a beautifully constructed retelling of the end of Camelot and the realization that the First Lady is far from the timid person she was portrayed as by the press. Slightly more impressive is a multi-story anthology that somehow manages to tie all the stories together at the end. Between a few above-average Hollywood releases, and an indie scene enabled by Netflix and the like, one could find enough wild-ride scares to drown out the real world ones, if only for a minute. At a remote rural cabin, a deaf-mute author named Maddie Flanagan's wife, Kate Siegel finds herself menaced by a masked predator whose intentions don't extend past wanting to torment and then kill her. Even the 3-D is a blast, with swirling ghosts and proton pack beams popping offscreen.
For her first feature since 2009's Jennifer's Body, Karyn Kusama delivers one of the year's great gripping thrillers with The Invitation, an intensely unnerving story about a Los Angeles man Logan Marshall-Green who, with his girlfriend in tow, attends a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife Tammy Blanchard and her new boyfriend Game of Thrones' Michiel Huisman —an awkward situation compounded by the fact that Marshall-Green and Blanchard's characters split following the death of their young child, which neither has properly gotten over. The direction, acting, camera work, and score are all at a high level, while the storytelling is some of the most powerful you'll see all year. Lincoln, Ross May 14, 2015. Something like a cross between a long-lost documentary and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Colombian writer-director Ciro Guerra's drama charts two hallucinatory courses—during distinct, and yet eerily similar, time periods—through the Amazon. Solid performances and a nice sense of tension complement the clever story of a haunted game that ensnares three young people.
The dynamic could sustain a movie itself, but then things go and get extra freaky in the final stretch. Hot on their tails is a soon-to-retire sheriff Bridges and his partner, who engage in their own morality dialectic as they drive deeper into the Texas heartland. South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook has made a name for himself with deliriously violent, sexually deranged revenge tales like Oldboy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and 2013's English-language Stoker starring Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska. Set over the course of a relatively uneventful week in its protagonist's life, Jarmusch's story is far less interested in big dramatic incidents than it is in the small details of Paterson's routine life, which slowly coalesce to form a muted, melancholy portrait of everyday existential despair. A P R I L 1 director ; Cary Solomon, Chuck Konzelman screenplay ; , David A. The patriarch is a man and a monster, a character we're all lucky to behold. Archived from on 14 February 2016.
Dean Heil, Oklahoma State 2. You can make a at any time. That's once again the case with Paterson, the understated story of a bus driver Adam Driver who shares the same name as the city in which he works, and whose days and nights are spent listening in on passengers' conversations, hanging out with his flighty, artistically minded wife Golshifteh Farahani , taking evening walks to the bar with his not-very-nice dog, and scribbling poetry in his notebook. How will Gopi eradicate himself from this mess? Geo Martinez, Boise State 157: 1. When the townsfolk realize their fate, and only have 10 minutes to evacuate, The Wave capsizes tranquility with 100 tons of liquid devastation.
Her political opponents have an army to kill her. As Chiron grows up, enjoying fleeting moments of euphoria amidst routine abuse and neglect, Jenkins charts thorny individual and interpersonal dynamics in which both salvation and damnation seem to stem from the same or, at least, similar source. All trademarks and service marks remain the property of their rightful owners and used for informational purposes only. Joey Ward, North Carolina 8. No mixed bags, interesting trainwrecks, or blockbusters that aren't as good as their box-office tallies suggest -- just the true gems. I know because I just re-watched it.
Blair Witch While this late-arriving sequel didn't blow the box office doors down, fans of the original may find themselves un pleasantly surprised by the scares cooked up by frequent collaborators Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, who genre fans know from You're Next and The Guest. Holmer's precise aesthetics echo her protagonist's detachment from both the pugilistic and dance cliques from which she seeks acceptance, and her slow-motion sequences of the troupe's rhythmic routines have an overpowering, hypnotic grace and splendor. Date Event Host Location Source January 21—31 , U. What matters here is that director Cheang Pou-soi's film features the finest hand-to-hand skirmishes of the year, with Wu Jing demonstrating deft martial-arts skills and Jaa—he of Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior fame—bringing the concussive thunder via his trademark elbow drops and flying knee attacks, which peak with him leaping, knees first, through the windshield of a moving bus. Some fans say this one's even better than the first Conjuring, but I say: why choose? It's safe to say you've never seen a horror movie quite like Robert Eggers's meticulous and hypnotic tale of 17th century New England outcasts living by a forest that harbors a horrific witch.
. Here are the movies that chilled us, spooked us, and gave us welcome nightmares over the last 365 days: 20. The Witch Sometimes you earn points for plain old originality. She meets with Gopi Govinda , who likes her instantly, and pretends to be the man of her dreams. In this thoroughly amusing 1970s neo-noir comedy, Ryan Gosling is a bumbling private investigator who finds himself paired with Russell Crowe's for-hire enforcer on a case involving a missing girl and a dead porn star.
From its astounding opening shot on a street corner circling around a drug dealer Mahershala Ali who'll come to be young Chiron's surrogate father figure—since his mother Naomie Harris is a junkie—this evocative drama captures an overwhelming sense of both place and character. Justin Oliver, Central Michigan 8. As Will Logan Marshall-Green works through emotional baggage, we work through the evident mystery. Where to see it right now: In theaters. The Thrillist Entertainment staff picked its , but this is every movie from 2016 -- big, small, and from around the world -- that achieves greatness.