In Netflix’s shoddy movie-of-the-week thriller Hypnotic, hypnosis is used as a tool of terror, making people either do horrible things or believe that horrible things are being done to them. For someone under the spell, an hour can feel like a minute, an enviable experience for anyone actually watching Hypnotic, an unrewarding slog being fished out of the garbage for Halloween no tricks or...
Construction worker Bill (Matt Damon) travels from Oklahoma to Marseille to visit his twentysomething daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin), who is five years into a nine-year prison sentence for the murder of her girlfriend. Her lawyer considers the case closed, but Dad is convinced of her innocence and so takes matters into his own hands. (Sound familiar? Amanda Knox has criticised the film’s...
The news that not one but multiple Covid-19 vaccines are on the way to pharmacies and hospitals worldwide came as a relief to us all, a confirmation that some semblance of normality would return in the next 12 months or so. But for the makers of Songbird, an audaciously assembled pandemic thriller that imagines a not-too-distant reality where Covid-23 has killed more than 100 million people, it...