Dan Says its Alright

  They Will Kill You  begins with a soaking wet Zazie Beetz waiting to start her maid job at swanky apartment building, The Virgil. Her character Asia is a former convict who has no idea her new employers are devil worshipers who sacrifice their staff to Lucifer. The building residents have no idea that Asia is actually there for reasons other than a steady paycheque and is not about to go gently into that good night. The touch paper is soon lit on a relentless blend of slapstick horror action that leaves little room for you to catch your breath across its ninety minute odd runtime. The most obvious comparison here is to 2019's Ready or Not and its sequel (which coincidentally released one week before this film), where an unsuspecting bride is left fighting for her life when her wealthy in-laws opt to make her a human sacrifice. While They Will Kill You shares that movie's comedic spirit we are much deeper into supernatural territory here. The grand old building and seemingly ...

The worst thing about Scream 7 isn't actually the film itself. It's the at best cowardly, actions of production company Spyglass Media who fired the star of the previous two films, Melissa Barrera, for daring to have an opinion on genocide. In addition to leaving an icky taste in the mouth, this move cost them fellow star Jenna Ortega and the guy who was supposed to direct the seventh instalment Christopher Landon, resulting in a return to the drawing board to completely rework the film. The only actually good thing about Scream 7 is also nothing to do with the actual film. Series mainstay Neve Campbell missed the previous instalment after producers lowballed her, but the production chaos of their own making means they've had to go crawling back. So Neve returns with a reported $7 million payday, a producer credit and a story based solely around how legendary her character Sydney is. Go her. The actual film doesn't warrant much discussion at all, given it does little mo...

From Scum to Starred Up, neither the big nor small screen are short of brutally frank depictions of life behind British bars. Wasteman adds a taut, modern take to the pile and shows that life isn't getting any easier inside. Philip Barantini (creator of Boiling Point and Adolescence) is on board as a producer so you know it's going to feel real and the Safdie brothers were at one point attached to direct, so you know it's going to be gut-clenchingly tense. It doesn't disappoint on either front. David Jonsson plays long term convict Taylor. A timid drug addict, he cuts the hair of the top-dog inmates in return for a regular fix and is existing rather than living as the years of his sentence tick by when he gets some unexpected news. Prison overcrowding means he is up for early release, provided he can keep his nose clean for a couple of weeks, something made increasingly tricky by the arrival of his new cellmate Dee (Tom Blyth). Dee encourages Taylor to make contact wit...

How to Make a Killing is loosely based on 1949 British crime comedy Kind Hearts and Cornets (which is in turn an adaptation of 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal). In a world of remakes, reboots and adaptations, that is pretty interesting source material and could almost qualify as an original idea. Unfortunately, the imagination mostly stops there and the film isn't funny or insightful enough to rise above "it's fine" territory. Glenn Powell is Becket Redfellow, a suit salesman who grew up largely in the foster care system as his mother died while he was young. He is heir to the fortune of his mother's estranged family and, in the unlikely event all the other senior Redfellows should perish, he would be a billionaire. A chance encounter with his status obsessed childhood crush Julia (Margaret Qualley) and an unjust demotion at work give him the notion to speed up his inheritance a little. As he arranges "accidents" for his fellow R...

Crime 101 is named for the California freeway one of the characters commits all his robberies along. It also doubles as describing his MO, he is successful because he makes sure he gets the fundamentals right every time.  It can also describe the film itself, which nails the basics of making a slick crime thriller better than just about any other movie has in quite some time. The professional thief is Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), a meticulous planner whose jobs never lead to anyone being hurt and are so well executed that nobody even has any idea they are all the work of one man. Nobody that is, except for Mark Ruffalo's Detective Lou Lubesnick, who is determined to catch the "101 Robber" even though his obsession is starting to lead to him being ostracised in the precinct. Both characters come into contact with high value insurance broker Sharon (Halle Berry) as Mike plans a big score and Lou joins the dots in an attempt to track him down. A potential fly in the ointmen...

  Whistle is Corin Hardy's third movie, after his 2015 breakout The Hallow and 2018's Conjuring spin-off The Nun. This new horror flick sits halfway between the indie energy of his maiden effort and the box ticking boredom of his big studio follow-up, with self seriousness butting up against dumb fun. The set-up is most reminiscent of Final Destination, with added high school slasher vibes. Chrys (Dafne Keen) moves in with her cousin Rel's (Sky Yang) family following the death of her father. Within about ten minutes of attending her high school she becomes besotted with Sophie Nellisse's Ellie, ends up in detention after a confrontation with loudmouth basketball player Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) and finds an Aztec death whistle in her new locker. Naturally, the teens end up blowing the death whistle which causes them all to be stalked by their future deaths. This manifests as a ghostly apparition of your dead future self who causes you to suffer said death as soon as they to...