Acclaimed screenwriter Rowan Joffé will try his hand at the directing game next year. For his debut, he has selected an auspiciously high-profile story. Brighton Rock, adapted from Graham Greene’s 1938 novel, is a captivating crime thriller and a chilling exploration of the human capacity for love, betrayal and violence. If all goes right, this will be one beautiful and scary film.

This article is filed under Best Books, Best Movies, Classics, Crime Fiction, Espionage, Great Britain, Literary Themes, Movies, Mystery, Religion, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers, Writers.

Sherlock Holmes as a strict Victorian period piece is over and done with, but the character still has potential in a new context. The only rule is not to stray from the unique faculties that make Sherlock such a distinctive and popular hero. If the story’s focus ceases to be the detective’s brilliant deductive logic, then the magic is lost and the character wasted. If, however, due attention and respect are paid to this detail, the rest is free and open to broader interpretation.

This article is filed under Best Books, Best Movies, Classics, Crime Fiction, Espionage, Great Britain, Literary Themes, Movies, Mystery, Short Stories, Television, The Fourth Wall, Theatre, Thrillers, Writers.

It’s almost Halloween, folks! Aren’t we supposed to be having fun? Rather than dwell further on the shortcomings of modern horror, we salute the spirit of the campfire tale, the ghost story, and the urban legend in this nostalgic look at great horror stories in film and television. Join me – Dan Fields – and my fellow campers Julia Rhodes and William Bibbiani, as we pass the flashlight and torch a few marshmallows.

This article is filed under Classics, Horror, Movies, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers.

Today we take a different look at the master horror directors. Each of these moviemakers has made an iconic footprint on the history of scary cinema, whether with a well-worn franchise or in a single terrifying stroke. In many cases, the great success of such a film overshadows a director’s lesser works. Some are forgotten with good reason, but others are worth reviving now and again. Join William Bibbiani, Julia Rhodes, and myself (Dan Fields) as we discuss the neglected offspring of the great names in horror.

This article is filed under Art, Best Movies, Horror, Movies, Television, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers.

I got myself a videotape of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest at a young age, and proceeded to watch the ever-living hell out of it. I can’t recall having seen what you might call a grown-up movie before that, and a lot of dramatic films that I love now might not have held my attention then. But North by Northwest really has got it all.

This article is filed under Art, Best Movies, Crime Fiction, Espionage, Movies, Mystery, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers.

Take some deep breaths, movie fans – we’re going in. This weekend’s new shocker, Devil, appears to feature a bunch of hapless folks trapped in a dark elevator with something quite nasty. Later this season, we will also be getting Buried, concerning a man negotiating for his life while buried in a box underground. Claustrophobia [...]

This article is filed under Horror, Movies, Mystery, Phobias, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Television, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers.

After years of silence, Hammer Film is returning to active production in a big way this year. To begin with, the studio is producing the upcoming Let Me In, a remake of the superb Swedish vampire story Let The Right One In (2008). With this and a number of other new flicks on the way, there is more exciting news. Christopher Lee, now a late octogenarian but still a commanding tower of a man, is back on board for at least one picture.

This article is filed under Horror, Movies, Mystery, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers.

A fascination with the supernatural, and particularly its dark side, dates back to the earliest days of moving pictures. Murnau’s Faust and Nosferatu top a seemingly endless list of diabolical encounters. We would like to share with you some our favorite devilish deals, demonic possessions, and hellish mischief from the vaults.

This article is filed under Horror, Movies, Television, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers.

Lucy, half human, half bonobo monkey, was genetically engineered by her scientist father, so that “humans can be moved into a more favorable spot in the evolutionary matrix, a position in which we may enjoy some of the superior qualities of our bonobo cousins.” His mission was to create “a new race of people, more like the bonobo but with human intelligence and language—therefore better suited to living in harmony with nature.”

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Thrillers.

Stephen King said that Olen Steinhauer’s spy book, The Tourist, is “the best spy novel I’ve ever read that wasn’t written by John le Carré.” Here’s the good news—The Nearest Exit, a continuation of that same story, is no letdown (though the background gained in reading that first book makes the first 100 pages of this one much more manageable).

This article is filed under Espionage, Fiction Reviews, Thrillers.

Justin Cronin has written an epic here. Like Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, this book is a character-driven apocalyptic road trip of a novel that takes us on a journey both physical and metaphysical. His writing transcends genre in every way, including a haunting description of death by nuclear fire.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Horror, Mystery, Thrillers.

Lisbeth Salander is broken, maybe beyond repair. Wanted for three murders in Stockholm, she shows up in the Emergency Room in Goteborg still breathing but with a bullet in her head. Her other wounds have been patched with duct tape, an improvisation the doctor on call admires as he preps her for life-saving surgery assisted by an American surgeon with a blood alcohol level that’s off the charts.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Mystery, Thrillers.

This week marks the opening of yet another horror remake: the new Nightmare on Elm Street releases on April 23, with the magnificent Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen, Little Children) as the king of night terrors Freddy Krueger. Robert Englund lent his spooky, almost silly persona to Krueger in all the previous Nightmare movies (there are [...]

This article is filed under Movies, Television, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers, True Crime.

Jackson as a zombie in “Thriller” William Bibbiani noted in the Great Music Videos #1 post that music videos are effectively commercials. They’re produced to sell copies of albums, to “sell” a musician to the public, or at the very least to boost (paid) MP3 downloads. Michael Jackson’s video for “Thriller” straddles the line between [...]

This article is filed under Movies, Music, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers.

The Extinction Clock is counting down. Time is short—10,800 minutes (just seven days)—and if the clock zeroes out, billions will die.
Ex-cop Joe Ledger and the DMS (Department of Military Science) are assigned the mission to stop the clock and the men behind it, a pair of freakishly brilliant monsters who intend to commit genocide on an apocalyptic scale.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Horror, Thrillers.