Posts Tagged ‘ suspense ’

In Layer Cake, which is based upon a British novel of the same name, we get a rare peak into the British criminal underground through the eyes of a very successful cocaine trafficker who is never named, but is played by Daniel Craig.  He is well-educated, smart, respectful, and not greedy.  Having accumulated enough of a modest fortune for himself to live pleasurably he plans to leave the business while he is still ahead, but that all changes when his supplier Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) assigns him two very difficult tasks before he will be allowed to leave: find the whereabouts of a young woman named Charlie, the daughter of a powerful associate name Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon) and find a buyer for a massive amount of ecstasy pills which have recently been stolen in Amsterdam.

Christian Bale’s performance as Travor Reznik in The Machinist may rank as one of his best ever.  He plays an industrial machinist plagued by chronic insomnia and a mysterious weight-loss that is bringing him down to levels that make him appear like someone from Ethiopia during its infamous famine.  He is, essentially, dying of insomnia and his work as a lathe operator begins to suffer because of it.  He claims to his friend/lover/prostitute Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) that he hasn’t slept in a year.

1999′s Lake Placid was an unusual movie from its beginnings.  It’s a star-studded black comedy about a giant crocodile terrorizing a small lake community in Maine featuring a flamboyant, wealthy professor with a passion for crocodiles in Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt), a common-sense, polite and gentlemanly local sheriff named Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson), Jack Wells (Bill Pullman) a rough-and-tumble member of the Maine Fish and Wildlife Service, and Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), a professor of paleontology with a New York City-based natural history museum.

The Kingdom is a 2007 blockbuster that accomplishes something many mainstream Hollywood movies attempt and fail: it creates a realistic thriller based on realistic events and portrays both sides of the conflict in reasonably equal lights. Director Peter Berg tells us the story of a team of FBI agents who push their way into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in an effort to investigate a terrorist attack in which Americans were killed.

Lucky Number Slevin can be seen almost as an adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest from a more modern perspective with the clever, witty rapid speech of very early films.  The director Paul McGuigan seems to have made this adaptation work, and work very well at that.