thrillers Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Maybe you've seen them, maybe you haven't, but French thrillers are making a comeback in North America. That's good news for people uninterested in art houses solely for the sake of watching foreign films: You don't have to be a Francophile to appreciate smart, meticulously generated suspense, and that's exactly the appeal of several French movies hitting American theaters this year. A steady mixture of warm reviews and positive word-of-mouth appears to have helped Guillame Canet's breathlessly entertaining drama Tell No One land an impressive $240,858 at 18 locations. Earlier this year, veteran auteur Claude Lelouch, long known for his cinematic explorations of eroticism and lawbreaking, remained thematically consistent with a delightfully complex story of double-crossing novelists and dysfunctional families called Roman de Gare. The movie made over $25,000 on two New York screens when it opened in late April, and eventually pulled in more than $1.5 million after expanding to theaters around the country. It's not hard to argue that Tell No One and Roman de Gare put most recent American thrillers to shame. North America, once the haven of film noir, appears to be outsourcing.

As journalist Erica Abeel recently observed in an interview with Canet, "French filmmakers are currently making the best old-style Hollywood thrillers." It's not the first time for a country that has a long history of borrowing from American cinema, and often improving on it. At the beginning of the French New Wave in the early 1960s, former Cahiers du Cinema critics like Jean Luc-Godard discovered Hollywood genre films and decided to make their own loopy versions. The results were often strangely philosophical and experiment works, ranging from Godard's Breathless to François Truffaut's ambitious Shoot the Piano Player.

I don't know much about Melissa George because I haven't seen the majority of films she's appeared in. Actually, I haven't seen any of the films she's appeared in. I do know that her star is slowly rising, and we'll definitely get a much better look at her when she stars opposite Josh Hartnett in the upcoming vampire thriller 30 Days of Night. Thankfully, I'm not here to announce George's involvement in a sequel to Captivity -- although the two films do share similar themes. Moviehole reports that George has signed on to star in Captive, a new thriller written and directed by Amanda Gusack. Apparently the film is shooting in Canada this month, yet I, personally, haven't heard of it (and nether has IMDb).

In the film, George will play a happily married mother who wakes up after a bad car accident to find herself a hostage in a remote waterfront warehouse. Some dude named Vince (who's also a "masked killer") is holding her, and "shocking revelations are about to turn her formerly safe and orderly existence upside down." I'm not sure what those "shocking revelations" might be, but I'd say waking up in a warehouse next to a masked killer is shocking in and of itself. As Moviehole cleverly points out, George seems fond of this type of material. Either that, or it's all she can get. Aside from Captive, she was stuck in a loony house with Ryan Reynolds in The Amityville Horror remake, she was kidnapped by organ harvesters in Turistas and we'll watch her fending off a vampire attack pretty soon in 30 Days of Night. Is it just me, or does someone like it freaky?

What defines a thriller? Is it suspense? Heart-pounding action? Heroes and villains? Michael Jackson in a torn red jacket with dead, dead eyes? (Oh, sorry. Different kind of thriller.)

Hell, we couldn't figure it out. After all, you could throw Jaws or The Sixth Sense into that category as easily as you would Vertigo, or The Bourne Identity. But crime thrillers -- now there's a genre we could sink our teeth into. Cops and robbers, adrenaline-pumping chase scenes, justice and vengeance -- we're reaching for our guns just thinking about it.

So with murder, mayhem and kicking some bad-guy butt on our minds, we came up with our list of the 25 best crime thrillers of all time. Jack Bauer would be proud. We hope. How do you think we did?

It's fitting that her first major film role was as a Princess, because Anne Hathaway's career since then has been somewhat of a fairytale in the making. Granted, it took a little while for her to break out of the "family film" cave she was hiding in for four years -- though, once she did, it was smooth sailing. While she missed out on any recognition for her involvement in The Devil Wears Prada (face it, her character wasn't exactly that spectacular), the success of the film helped propel her up to leading lady status. Now, she'll be playing Jane Austen in the upcoming Becoming Jane, as well as co-starring alongside Steve Carell as Agent 99 in the big-screen version of Get Smart.

However, there's still one genre left for her to explore -- the supernatural thriller. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Hathaway is set to star in Passengers, to be directed by Rodrigo Garcia, produced/financed by Mandate Pictures and distributed domestically by Columbia Pictures. In the pic, Hathaway will play a grief counselor who is sent to assist six plane crash survivors, and then develops a "special connection" with one of them. Sounds sweet enough, right? Ah, but here comes the (supernatural?) element -- apparently, the survivors all begin to disappear one by one, forcing our cute counselor to begin investigating this bizarre occurrence herself. Written by Ronnie Christensen, the film is set to begin production early next year.

But can she handle a thriller? Not for nothing, but Hathaway is so cute and delicate -- the kind of girl you just wanna hug ... carefully -- and so I'm curious to see what she brings to a more dramatic, edgier, supernatural film. Although I still can't figure out where the supernatural part fits in (is a ghost killing everyone?), but I'm sure it will all make sense on screen. We hope.