Veron The Reviewer

Unsane is a psychological horror/thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Claire Foy as protagonist Sawyer Valentini who is paranoid about a stalker coming back into her life, but when she visits a psychiatrist, she is wrongfully committed to a mental institution. Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple also star. This is a psychological horror and thriller film and focuses greatly on Sawyer's mental state as she questions her sanity while in the institution. We view the events through Sawyer's perspective, and she is so fraught with tension and paranoia, that we the viewer is never quite sure if what we're seeing is real or just a figment of Sawyer's imagination as her stress and her worries catch up to her. Claire Foy's performance is compelling and honest, and allows viewers to easily get invested in the character and sympathize with her even as she gets quite aggressive and rude with the other inmates and the staff, though she certainly has good enough ...

Come To Daddy  is a thriller film directed by Ant Timpson and starring Elijah Wood. Wood plays a sheltered young man who has gone to his long-lost father's beach house to reconnect with him after receiving a letter, but things take a strange, dark turn fast as his father's behavior gets more confrontational. The plot is hard to talk about further without spoiling the twists halfway through the film. Let's just say that the first half sets up a certain expectation that is greatly subverted about halfway through the film with a sudden twist, then seems to set up some other expectations only to subvert them too. The result is a film that is thrilling to watch as things get very crazy, with someone wielding a flaming crossbow. Yes, you read that right, a flaming crossbow ! The writing is clever but the film is also quite bloody, and while there isn't really a lot of gore, it is quite visceral nonetheless. The performances are fantastic. Elijah Wood plays a sheltered, insecu...

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs  is a Western anthology film directed by the Coen Brothers, featuring six stories set in the Wild West. The segments "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" and "All Gold Canyon" are both relatively lighthearted, "Near Algodones" is rife with black comedy, while "The Mortal Remains" has sinister undertones underlining a stagecoach ride, and "Meal Ticket" and "The Gal Who Got Rattled", the lengthiest segment, are significantly more tragic and bleak. On the whole, all the segments are very engaging, with great performances, particularly from Tim Blake Nelson as Buster Scruggs in "Ballad of Buster Scruggs", Harry Melling as the Artist in "Meal Ticket", and Zoe Kazan as Alice in "The Gal Who Got Rattled". The anthology nature of the film makes it difficult to talk about the plot at length, but all of them contain some rather interesting an unexpected twists, though most of the stor...

Cop Car  is a thriller directed by Jon Watts (who also directed the Tom Holland Spider-Man films), starring Kevin Bacon, Shea Whigham, Camryn Manheim, James Freedson-Jackson, and Hays Wellford. The film is minimalist, with just five principal cast members and basically no one else. Wellford and Freedson-Jackson play preteen runaways who stumble upon the seemingly abandoned cop car of a sheriff (Bacon) with a secret. From there, the film spirals into a tense sequence of events that sees the sheriff desperate to reclaim his car while the two boys remain unaware of the encroaching danger. To say any more about the plot would spoil the tension and the fun, so I will keep this review rather brief. The performances of Wellford and Freedson-Jackson as they childishly steal the cop car for a joyride, oblivious to the situation at hand, as well as their subsequent terror as the situation goes out of control, is powerful, affecting, and highly realistic. Bacon, too, gives a great performance...