Monthly Archives: April 2025

Reel Views, Review

Drop

Anchored around a single location like Phone Booth and Red Eye before it, the gripping new thriller Drop chooses a high-rise restaurant in downtown Chicago as its locale du jour. 38 stories above the hustle and bustle, single mother and therapist Violet (Meghann Fahy) grabs a drink at the bar while waiting for her photographer date Henry (Brandon Sklenar) to arrive. It’s Violet’s first night out with a potential suitor in four years, the wounds from the traumatic death of her abusive husband still lingering, while also bearing the responsibility of raising son Toby (Jacob Robinson) by herself. Thankfully, her younger sister Jen (Violett Beane) has stepped up and agreed to babysit Toby for Violet’s special night out and mom can even check in virtually with a video feed from her phone. Henry arrives, apologetic for his absence, and the two get seated but it doesn’t take long for their evening to take a turn for the terrifying.

Violet asks if she can keep her phone on their table so she can receive updates from Jen, to which Henry agrees, but her phone instead keeps pinging with messages sent anonymously from someone in their midst. The Digi-Drops — a facsimile of Apple’s AirDrop technology, so as to not clash with their “no villain clause” — start as obnoxious memes but quickly become more personal. The sender soon reveals their intent and instructions: Violet must kill Henry before the end of their date or the masked hitman in her house will murder Toby and Jen. The disguised “dropper” seems to have eyes in the sky and ears on the table, informing Violet that they’ll also make good on their threat if she tips anyone off or tries to leave the restaurant. Most of us have been on bad first dates but the one at the center of Drop is about as dire as it gets.

Just last Christmas, Netflix had a holiday hit with the nail-biter Carry-On, which also involved a high-wire act of coercion from a criminal communicating covertly with our protagonist. While the identity of the caller in that cat-and-mouse game is revealed about halfway through, Drop makes us sweat out the source of the messages, and their motives, to the very end. Along with screenwriters Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, director Christopher Landon knows the fun of this tale is in us trying to figure out which of the restaurant patrons is responsible for terrorizing Violet. She’s waiting for Henry at the bar long enough to meet several potential suspects but once the Digi-Drops come flooding in, Violet’s bandwidth for sleuthing is strained between heeding the commands from her phone and keeping her date unaware of her predicament.

While Brandon Sklenar is a bit of a drip as the well-meaning but mostly bland date, Meghann Fahy is outstanding in her first big lead role on-screen after breaking out in The White Lotus two years ago. Given the baggage that Violet brings to the table, this evening out would be difficult enough for her as is but as the plot necessitates, it becomes exponentially more demanding. As a survivor of domestic abuse, she unfortunately understands all too well how to put on a brave face and conceal her anxiety under horrific circumstances. Violet knows her son and sisters’ lives are also in jeopardy if Henry decides to ditch the date, so she somehow has to be good company while also constantly monitoring her phone for updates. Fahy is brilliant in the way she balances these conflicting tasks as an actress and her work alone makes the film stand apart from similarly-plotted thrillers.

Naturally, Drop isn’t immune to the plot contrivances that keep thrill rides like this ticking along and some may argue it commits more than its fair share of narrative faux pas. It’s not a plot that necessarily holds up well under scrutiny and there’s one particular story beat that makes absolutely zero sense in hindsight. But Landon and his team certainly do everything they can to keep us on our toes at all times and do so while getting us fully immersed in this gorgeous setting. The restaurant where the majority of the film takes place is an immaculately-rendered and beautifully-lit set that encourages us to look around with our protagonist to suss out the situation. Ironically, Drop is an ideal date night movie choice for those adventurous enough to take the ride.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Sinners, a supernatural horror film starring Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld, about twin brothers who return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
Also coming to theaters is Sneaks, an animated comedy starring Anthony Mackie and Martin Lawrence, involving a sentient sneaker who unwittingly finds himself lost in New York City and has to rescue his sister with the help of other talking shoes.
Streaming on Shudder is Dead Mail, a period thriller starring Sterling Macer Jr. and John Fleck, in which an ominous help note finds its way to a 1980s post office, connecting a dead letter investigator to a kidnapped keyboard technician.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

Deep Downey: Zodiac

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

The poster reads “There’s more than one way to lose your life to a killer” above a fog-obscured shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, the illuminated suspension cables resembling mournful eyes weeping over the Bay Area. This haunting one-sheet sets the stage perfectly for David Fincher’s quietly devastating Zodiac, a thorough and thoughtful retelling of one of the most infamous unsolved cases in United States history. Having spent his childhood in a small town 20 miles north of San Francisco, Fincher had a personal connection to the material, hearing terrifying stories about the elusive Zodiac Killer at an impressionable age. But the film also follows a theme that can be found in many of the other works throughout his career: monomaniacal focus in one’s professional life at the expense of one’s personal life.

After depicting a brutal 4th Of July shooting at a Vallejo highway lookout point, Zodiac introduces us to the main players involved in trying to track down the titular slayer. The San Francisco Chronicle is one of several news outlets to receive encoded letters from the killer who calls himself “Zodiac”, striking immediate and intense curiosity in the paper’s political cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). The Chronicle’s head crime reporter, Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), is skeptical at first, but when Graysmith makes a correct prediction before the first letter is deciphered, Avery becomes the Bernstein to Graysmith’s Woodward. More killings and more letters follow, causing police inspectors Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) to head up the case but as years go by, promising leads turn to dead ends.

Though it’s a movie about a well-known, real-life serial killer, Zodiac doesn’t follow in the footsteps of other mystery thrillers, where we’re shown evil deeds but can feel better having witnessed them knowing justice is served in the end. Fincher and his screenwriter James Vanderbilt did copious amounts of research investigating the true identity of the Zodiac Killer but they don’t present one theory here as absolute truth. It’s as much of a police procedural and news journalism movie as a thriller, given that the search for the killer is the actual story as opposed to their unveiling. How can we reconcile that the details of unspeakable acts can remain forever unknowable to everyone except those involved? How do we collectively move on from cases that are ultimately deemed unsolvable? Zodiac follows two central characters who believe in their bones that we can’t and we don’t.

On the morning the Chronicle receives the first letter, Avery blithely offers 20 bucks to whoever decodes the killer’s name before heading to the nearby watering hole Morti’s for an early drink. Though he acts indifferent initially, Avery’s intrigued after the letter is deciphered that Graysmith correctly predicted the killer wouldn’t reveal their name. He introduces himself to Graysmith — even though they’d already been working together for 9 months — and asks “how does one do that?” with inquisitive snark when Graysmith works to figure out the “leftover symbols” from the Zodiac’s first note. Thus commences the beginning of an unlikely professional partnership, where earnest curiosity and cynical scrutiny produce a nexus of all-encompassing fixation. Gyllenhaal and Downey Jr. play off each other brilliantly as these opposite personalities collide with one another.

Look no further than the sequence following the Chronicle getting their second Zodiac letter, when Avery invites Graysmith to Morti’s intent on pressing him why he’s been going through his trash but instead getting hung up on his drink order. The bartender slides a distractingly blue cocktail Graysmith’s way and after a minute of labored conversation, Avery quips “alright, this can no longer be ignored: what is that you’re drinking?” Graysmith defends his Aqua Velva and after Avery takes a long sip following a short pause, Fincher smash cuts to Downey Jr. with his head resting on a booth table with six empties in front of his face. With an ace song choice of “Crystal Blue Persuasion” playing in the background, Avery drunkenly asks Graysmith what he wants out of all of this sleuthing, explaining “it’s good business for everyone but you.”

Downey Jr.’s sardonic wit is the highlight of these early interactions — and remains one of his most indispensable assets all these years later — but Avery’s self-destructive streak created a pathway for a more tragic performance. After Avery receives a Halloween card from the Zodiac, ominously portending “you are doomed”, crime reporters begin sporting “I Am Not Paul Avery” pins, cheekily signaling they don’t want to be targeted next. Though Paul himself clips it to his lapel and says of the Killer “he wishes to remain anonymous; I wish to remain infamous”, the stresses of the unwanted attention take their toll. Avery buys a gun, smokes like a chimney and takes enough day trips to Morti’s to put his position at the Chronicle in jeopardy. A third act scene set on Avery’s houseboat hammers home how his involvement in the case led to a heartbreaking downward spiral.

Downey Jr. has made it clear through several interviews that his time shooting Zodiac was not especially pleasant. Fincher is well-known to be an exacting filmmaker, sometimes demanding dozens of takes for even seemingly simple scenes. Needless to say, Downey Jr. didn’t have any room for looser line readings or improvisation and Fincher’s penchant for perfectionism inevitably led to long days of shooting. Downey Jr. found his own way of protest by, according to Fincher, leaving mason jars of urine on-set in lieu of loo breaks. Years later, Downey Jr. would work with Christopher Nolan on — and ultimately win an Oscar for —Oppenheimer and the experience working with another similarly precise director seemed to give him a renewed appreciation for the process. Speaking in 2023 with co-star Mark Ruffalo, Downey Jr. admits “I called Fincher recently because, in retrospect, everything changes. 15 years later, you have such a different perspective on stuff, you know?”

Reel Views, Review

The Amateur

Based on a 1981 film of the same name, the espionage tale The Amateur is a movie filled with smart characters who are trapped in a movie that isn’t as smart as they are. Our protagonist Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is said to have an IQ of 170 and we believe it. He works five levels below the ground floor of the CIA headquarters in Decryption And Analysis, scrolling through endless lines of code and finding connections that no one else would see. He chats with an anonymous source he believes is in Eastern Europe, with whom he exchanges eyes-only files; if the premise of the hit show Severance was real, Charlie would be a prime candidate for the titular procedure. Throughout the film, he is consistently multiple steps ahead of those pursuing them, so much so that he outpaces director James Hawes and his screenwriters Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli in the process.

The opening of The Amateur has Charlie seeing his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) off as she heads to London for a conference. The next day, Charlie’s boss Director Moore (Holt McCallany) shares horrible news with him: Sarah has been killed after being held hostage by terrorists. Moore swears those responsible for her death will be held to account but Charlie doesn’t trust that the agency will avenge Sarah’s death the way he feels she deserves. In a bold move, to say the least, he threatens to leak classified material unless the CIA trains him as a field operative so he can carry out his revenge. With his back against the wall, Moore tasks Colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne) with turning the cerebral and diffident Charlie into a cold-blooded killer.

Because of the nature of the premise, The Amateur asks us to believe that one man — albeit a highly intelligent one — could evade a manhunt from one of the most formidable government agencies in the world. As Charlie’s rogue mission finds him traveling from numerous European countries, it becomes more unlikely that he would actually be able to continue his pursuit unabated. Along the way, a couple characters reappear to coerce Charlie to give up his dangerous undertaking but this feels like a much more kid-gloves approach than the CIA would take in actuality. These tactics spur on subsequent plot holes and leaps in logic that begin to add up, especially in the movie’s last 15 minutes; a character moment towards the very end actually made me cock my head to the side like a dog hearing a strange noise.

All of the performances in The Amateur are convincing but at the same time, none of the actors are being asked to do much outside of their current capabilities. Malek is doing a slight variation on his lead character in the tech thriller series Mr. Robot, although he has to dial up a bit more emotion into the flashback scenes between Charlie and Sarah. Oddly, Brosnahan is relegated to a stock “dead wife” role, even though she’s going to appear as the much more pivotal Lois Lane in Superman this summer. Talented supporting players like Julianne Nicholson and Jon Bernthal, the latter of whom is only in two scenes, are only given sketches of actual characters. More prominently, Fishburne has some fun zingers in his training sequences with Malek; “at point blank range, you might have a 50/50 shot at hitting something,” he smirks in front of a shooting target at a gun range.

The Amateur isn’t a bad movie from a technical perspective. Despite some misjudged shaky cam, it’s well-shot and edited in a way that makes its 2-hour runtime move along briskly. It’s just not a film that distinguishes itself enough from other revenge or spy films we’ve seen already. Its release comes just a few weeks after Black Bag, already one of the year’s best, which also follows spies chasing spies but does so with much more panache and thematic heft. This movie feels like it never expands on its initial hook of taking a lab rat out of his environment and placing him in a more menacing setting where his technological skills don’t mean nearly as much as killer instinct. The Amateur is professional enough on its surface but could use some training in developing a more robust storyline.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Drop, a mystery thriller starring Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar, in which a widowed mother’s first date in years takes a terrifying turn when she’s bombarded with anonymous threatening text messages on her phone during their upscale dinner.
Also coming to theaters is Warfare, an action film starring D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Will Poulter, which follows a platoon of Navy SEALs in real-time as they embark on a mission through insurgent Iraqi territory in 2006.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is G20, an action thriller starring Viola Davis and Anthony Anderson, which finds the U.S. President defending her family and fellow world leaders when terrorists take over the G20 summit in South Africa.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup