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Showing posts with the label psychological

SPHERE - REVIEW

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Based on a Michael Crichton novel, Sphere was a 1998 sci-fi film about a team of experts in various fields exploring some crashed underwater spaceship. Directed by Barry Levinson, the film boasts an all-star cast with Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Coyote and Liev Schreiber all being part of the main team. Sphere is a psychological thriller that's a bit like a cross between The Abyss , Event Horizon , The Thing and Alien as the more the selected experts investigate the spaceship, the creepier the tone of the film becomes. Eventually, characters start dropping like flies as various unexpected threats start popping up randomly from killer jellyfish to giant squids. The discovery of a gold alien sphere in the middle of the spaceship leads to growing paranoia among the crew and various twists and turns. There are references here and there to 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and, indeed, the film attempts to capture the book's sense of adventure and cla

UNKNOWN - REVIEW

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To keep Liam Neeson fans satisfied in-between Taken movies, Unknown was made and claimed to be in the same vein boasting action-packed trailers displaying another European setting and shady bad guys wearing leather jackets. The film itself does sort of develop into something resembling a Taken movie but, for the most part, this is a different genre altogether. Unknown goes for more of a Hitchcockian mystery like, say, The Man Who Knew Too Much but with a modern edge, of course. Neeson plays a man who arrives in Berlin for an event but, on the way to recovering his briefcase from the airport, soon has a car accident. When he wakes up and leaves the hospital, he finds that no-one, not even his wife recognises him and that another man has taken over his identity. The whole film is spent following Neeson's character as he tries to figure out exactly what the hell is going on, who is messing with him or whether he's somehow lost his mind. It's a fun intrigue to try and

MARNIE - REVIEW

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Alfred Hitchcock decided to torture Tippi Hedren again soon after The Birds with this little psychological thriller from 1964 also starring Sean Connery. The film sees Hedren play Marnie , a thief who changes her identity for every heist. When she is finally caught by Connery's suave publishing company owner, the film takes a weird turn as he decides to tackle her deeply rooted psychological problems himself and help her resolve them. Armed with a brilliantly erratic score by maestro Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock puts these two characters, who could not be more different, together and lets us sit there uncomfortably as both of them reveal darker, somewhat unsettling sides to themselves. Hedren is at her best here, displaying a nervous bitterness which comes out in short, yet significant bursts. Meanwhile, Connery oozes with charisma but, throughout the film, his character reveals something of a controlling, fetishist side to him as he literally forces Marnie into marryin