Fight fire with fire

A teen-aged boy and his mother move to a small town after their father and husband is shot dead in the streets of Chicago. The boy meets new friends and is immediately introduced to the backwoods gun culture. Good Guy with a Gun, by John Mossman, is a rural noir thriller that attempts to draw attention to the horrors of gun violence, but makes a lacklustre film.

A peerless fucked-up butcher

One of the best movies of all time. Maybe the best thriller in the world. Sure there's the riveting unique plot with a twist of a lifetime, but a masterpiece as a whole. A tremendous performance by the cast. Suspense of almost mythic proportions! No words do justice.

The cemetery in human heart

Former CIA executive, a woman living in the woods, is brought back into action. Pretty inconvenient because she was just about to kill herself. But the instincts kick off and bunch of commandos are just something to shrug off your shoulders. Solid, but a little stupid thriller. 

Quone a patient

And just like that, almost imperceptibly I watched the first season of Seinfeld. Of course, it's only five episodes, but still. The series that keeps on giving and hasn't aged one bit.

That kid ain't a killer

A hitchhiker leaves quite a many dead people in his wake. A young man escapes the clutches of him and is subsequently stalked by the fucker. Even framed for his crimes! A perfect old-school thriller and a bona fide cult classic.

Godless suburban life

A riveting film full of paranoia. A man suspects there's something fishy going on next door. The neighbors are not what they appear to be. But you can't just walk to the police and say they are terrorists or otherwise a threat to the society. You need evidence. Mark Pellington's Arlington Road is a bloody good thriller.

Liberated from the hell of living

An FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is assigned to catch a serial killer responsible for murdering multiple families throughout Oregon for decades. Creepy horror shit as a whole, but Nicolas Cage still steals the show as an off-putting and disturbing occult freak Longlegs. To an acquired horror taste only.

Damnation without applause

Hectic as shit. Too much action to chew on and the plot itself, the characters and their motives were buried under tightly paced action. However lots of the cool 90s action thriller vibes. Reminiscences of Speed, Die Hard, Phone Booth and others. An enjoyable ride with a pretty weak story line.

How you wage war on your own family

Traffic by Steven Soderberg has a triple plot. Three stories all involved with narcotics. There's Mexican policemen and ruthless drug cartels everywhere, DEA agents protecting a witness about to testify against a drug boss and the daughter of the head of DEA addicted to crack cocaine. This amazing film travels between these universes with bottomless ease.  

Kill, adapt or die

Wolves can be a relationship killer. A man goes hunting with the friend and former lover of his fiancée and it becomes a fight for a survival. A pack of wolves out there in the woods as well. A survival thriller genre has hit the all-time low.

Where the end times begin

Architect John Kersey is back in L.A. He's hired to eliminate drug dealers. From the smallest street corner pushers to the fat cats on top, anybody connected with drugs has to die. Kersey's girlfriend's daughter just overdosed on cocaine and died, so the mission is a no-brainer to Kersey. Gotta keep the killing discreet though because the police have a hunch that's he's the Vigilante, an unknown justice-fighter who has cleaned the streets of scumbags in New York and L.A. before. He's so good, Kersey, cops and drug lords are helpless. Too bad the movie is terribly outdated and flawed.

The long road home

Russell Crowe is a menacing figure in Unhinged. Too bad the main character, Caren Pistorius's Rachel, is silly and sometimes downright stupid, so it takes a lot away from an otherwise cool flick where road rage turns crazy revenge. 

It all starts with a simple choice

Six strangers meet at the El Royale hotel of Lake Tahoe. There's secrets hidden. Drew Goddard's Bad times at the El Royale is such a fun crime thriller, outstanding cinematography, brilliant soundtrack and an overall hoot.

Where fun goes to die

Some of the scenes in Gave O'Connor's The Accountant you need to pause, just to let it sink what you just witnessed. Then rewind and watch them again. The action, not that it comes around too often, is arrestingly straight-forward and firm. Easily Ben Affleck's strongest role to date. He's plays a smart accountant, and a part-time mercenary, Christian Wolff who is such a cool character that it's a shame they didn't franchise it like Bond or Bourne.

March of the boom boom

The security of a British outpost in Afghanistan has been compromised. An enormous compound is guarded by two soldiers. I was as busy counting plot-holes as they were counting bullets. Combat movie trash.

A blind pig must use its nose

Nothing but a popcorn movie. Freelance is an action comedy adventure where bodies are piling up for fun. It's silly and easily forgettable waste of time packed full of embarrassingly corny one-liners that are supposed to make you laugh.  

In men there is madness

 

Nothing can go wrong when a hot summer day in Ostrobothnia, Finland, includes debt collection, a submachine gun, moonshine liquor and stubborn brothers. Pekka Parikka's Pohjanmaa (1988) is a narrative into landscape of the Finnish soul.

Feed the beast within

Esko Ketola is a veteran weightlifter. Teräsvaari is a documentary where this 72 year old iron man prepares to compete in a World Cup in Argentina. He's a confident man, resiliently fights against the hardship of getting old. Quite decent, but they just as well could have written an article somewhere instead of filming the process.

Bad vibes terminated

People are collectively seeing dreams of Paul Matthews who is an actual man, a professor, in real life. First they are normal dreams, harmless, good dreams and some of sexual nature even. And that makes Paul famous, a national phenomenon. Then the dreams turn into nightmares. And he's no longer popular. He becomes despised and ostracised. What a movie. A bloody hilarious dark comedy, a borderline horror flick. Nicolas Cage is on fire.

A chalice of poisoned blood

A Danish movie set in Greenland. And based on it the life out there is quite straightforward and nice. To Jan, a Danish nurse working there, the Greenlandic way of living gets under his skin. Kalak is based on an autobiographical novel by Kim Leine, who also contributed to the screenplay, it's directed by Isabella Eklöf. You don't get to see movies shot in places like Nuuk, Greenland, too often, so it's a treat. By the same token, had it been shot somewhere else, no one would hardly bat an eyelid.