TheRetroCritic

Joel Schumacher directs this tense thriller about a guy who walks out of his car in the middle of a traffic jam before venting his anger at society towards whoever gets in his way or aggravates him slightly. Falling Down sees Michael Douglas deliver a complex, creepy performance in a role which should have earned him at least an Oscar nomination. He plays William Foster, the stressed-out geeky-looking everyman who embarks on an eventful journey across town to see his daughter for her birthday. Unfortunately, his ex-wife isn't exactly thrilled to learn he's on his way to see them, which only adds to his frustrations. Along the way, William encounters some petty criminals, a neo-Nazi crackpot, some rude construction workers and he causes mayhem in a convenience store and a fast food restaurant. What makes him something of an anti-hero for most of the film is the fact that it's always someone else starting a conflict with him for no reason and he's always kind of righ

This thriller from 2011 sees Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman play a couple who are taken hostage in their own home by a group of thieves. Most of the action takes place in one location in a somewhat gimmicky outing from director Joel Schumacher. This isn't the first time Schumacher has worked with Cage as they collaborated on 8MM some time back and the actor is given a decent challenge with Trespass since he is portraying a victim but one who is a smug rich dude on the surface while in fact being a rather brave father and husband and a loser a little bit on top of it. That's actually the interesting thing about this film: it seems like the usual predictable home invasion B-movie with bland, clichéd characters but it does go out of its way to flesh out those family members (and their captors) as the story develops. Both the diamond-dealing husband Kyle (Cage) and his wife Sarah (Kidman) seem to be hiding something from each other, their daughter Avery (Liana Liberato) has

Pretty much every Nicolas Cage movie these days is packed with little glorious Cagisms so you'd expect a film by Joel Schumacher, the man behind Batman & Robin  (and other, admittedly better films) to offer us a good bunch of those and yet 8MM is actually disappointingly low on Cage lols. This is quite probably because it's a decent flick with a darker plot and a Roman Polanski-esque tone throughout making it difficult to burst out laughing constantly Wicker Man -style. The plot follows Tom Welles (Cage), a private investigator, as he investigates a snuff film in which a young girl could have been killed for real. This search takes him down a sleazy road he's obviously not used to and to a grim underworld he never knew existed. On the way, he gets the help of a sex shop clerk with the hard-to-forget name of Max California (the ever brilliant Joaquin Phoenix) and has to deal with a good bunch of dodgy, twisted characters. It's one of those descent-into-hell typ

Film premises don't get much simpler than that. A dude answers the phone in a phone booth and ends up being kept there by a maniacal sniper-wielding stranger who makes him do whatever he wants and sounds exactly like Jack Bauer. The entire film takes place, you've guessed it, in and around a single phone booth and attempts a Hitchcockian thriller within that limited setting. Colin Farrell plays the put-upon Stu, a douchy New York publicist "romantically" interested in one of his clients, played by the reliably squeaky-voiced Katie Holmes, despite being married. The voice on the phone, Kiefer Sutherland's voice that is, forces Stu into making awkward, morally grey decisions and the suspense rests on both whether Stu is smart enough to pull through and whether Sutherland's creep is as truly insane as he seems. It's unclear what the mysterious caller wants so, as the viewer, you're left to slowly make your mind up about that, which really helps bui