Reviews

The Hateful Eight does not seem likely to end up as anyone's favorite Quentin Tarantino film, but it may be his most important. Tarantino has been exploring the landscape of revenge for four films now. In Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 he brought all manner of stylized violence to the screen culminating in the killing of a man who didn't seem to live up to the hatred the main character felt. In Inglorious Basterds he put our own love of violence at odds with Nazis reveling in the deaths of American soldiers. In Django Unchained his hero took vengeance on the entire concept of slavery by proxy.

The Hateful EightBut where all of those films had a liberal dose of cinematic sugar to help the medicine go down, The Hateful Eight slides down the gullet bitter and sticky. It feels like the end of a journey, of a man who has realized that when you give an audience sugar with their medicine, you only create an audience addicted to sugar.

The film opens with the image of a stone crucifix, the face of Jesus filling the frame, weather worn and draped in snow, looking more like a monster than a man. A stage coach rides past the cross through the white blanket of snow, shortly stopping in front of another figure: a black man seated atop three dead bodies in the middle of the road.

These are the images that set the tone for the rest of the movie, a stagecoach with a lawman and a criminal caught between a stone-dead god and man's cruel justice.

The lawman is John "The Hangman" Ruth a bounty hunter whose defining characteristic is his insistence on bringing in his bounties alive. The criminal is Daisy Domergue, a rough woman whose head is worth ten thousand dollars to the Hangman. The black man is Major Warren, a Civil War veteran turned bounty hunter. After an uneasy negotiation, John Ruth takes Major Warren in to his care, and the stage coach rolls on until it encounters another traveler lost on the freezing road, a former confederate soldier turned sheriff. This odd posse makes their way to Minnie's Haberdashery where they find four more men taking shelter from the oncoming storm.

The Hateful Eight reviewed The feel of the film isn't quite like anything else Tarantino has ever done. It's still unmistakably his work, but where many of his other films feel wild and bombastic, The Hateful Eight seems staid and contemplative. The whole story unfolds like a play. Dialogue has always been one of Tarantino's greatest strengths, but here the words go on and on, a string of seemingly endless introductions and explanations and negotiations.

The mystery that unfolds in the movie's three hour run time isn't truly a mystery at all. It runs in a straight line from beginning to end, and while there are moments in the film that might be counted as surprises, the plot never truly twists in a way that redefines itself.

The directorial style, too, is more grounded. The images on screen are still immaculate, but they're not tinged with the same wizzbang whimsy that has defined Tarantino in the past.

This is Tarantino stripped bare.

And it's all to a purpose. It's easy to draw comparisons between The Hateful Eight and Tarantino's previous film Django Unchained, because they're both westerns that deal heavily with the problem of slavery in America, but in some ways the two films couldn't be more different. Django Unchained saw Tarantino trying to craft a new and better history, one in which the black man rose up against his white oppressors and rode off happily into the sunset, but The Hateful Eight paints a far bleaker picture.

If the violence seems more brutal here than in Tarantino's previous work, it is only because it has lost its sense of play. This is not violence playing homage to Tarantino's favorite films, but rather violence that reflects the brutality of the world.

There are no heroes in this tale. John Ruth beats his helpless prisoner without hesitation (an act that elicited a disturbing number of laughs in the theater I was in). Major Warren is just as bitter and spiteful as the Confederates he meets along the way. He lies and manipulates those around him, and justifies himself at every turn.

He wraps his lies around him like a blanket. And there are blankets everywhere in The Hateful Eight: the blanket of snow on the ground, white and cold, obscuring the harsh landscape beneath; the quilts and skins used to keep away the cold; blankets covering the evidence of the misdeeds of the past; blankets denied to a freezing enemy. Comforting. Covering. Concealing. The blankets are all lies.

The Hateful Eight is a bleak picture of a cold world filled with rotten men. Their trust is fleeting, their truces self-serving, and if they manage to put aside their differences it is only unite in common hatred against another.

For more reviews like this, go to HumanEchoes.com

ou could be forgiven for thinking of Nebraska as an art film. Shot in black and white, nominated for an Academy Award, and seen by next to no one, it certainly seems to check all the boxes of the sort of insufferable self-important Oscar-bait movie the average movie-goer has come to disdain. But Nebraska is far more earthy and relatable than it first appears.

NEBRASKAThe story follows Woody Grant, an ordinary man at the end of an ordinary life, who has convinced himself that the sweepstakes letter he received in the mail is actually worth a million dollars, and who is hell-bent on collecting the sum in Lincoln, Nebraska.

His son David tries to dissuade him at first, but Grant is determined to collect his winnings, and so, hoping for nothing more than a little more time with his father, David agrees to take him on the 800 mile pilgrimage to the office of the sweepstakes company. The two stop off along the way in Woody's old stomping grounds in Rapid City South Dakota, and it is there that the bulk of the plot takes place.

We see Woody encounter old friends, and family, and as the story unfolds we come to understand that there is more to him than his silent demenor indicates.

Nebraska is a movie about what it means to get old. The black and white cinematography is not so much about artistic flourish as it is a demonstration of a life that has been drained of color. More than half of the characters appearing on screen are over sixty, and they're all tired and ugly and bored with life.

But when folks around the town get wind of Woody's supposed winnings, things begin to change. Excitement begins to bleed back into their lives again, and the story which at first seemed doomed to be a plodding character piece picks up speed. Woody becomes something of a local celebrity, a fact that is hilariously frustrating to David who tries over and over to convince his father's friends and family that the winnings aren't real with increasingly poor results. Old friends and enemies come out of the woodwork sniffing for Woody's faux fortune, and greed and jealousy rear their heads in unexpected frequently humorous ways.

Woody's wife, June, adds even more life to the picture when she shows up in Rapid City. Her relationship with Woody is frequently combative, but her brash attitude and candid words make her one of the most fascinating characters in the film. Her candor about her past sexual conquests shocks her sons, but her uninhibited voice balances out Woody's stony reticence perfectly. Her frequent nagging of her husband seems harsh at first, but as the film progresses we come to see that their relationship is deeper than and stronger than it first appears.

Nebraska takes a look back at life's journey from the end of the road. Woody is not a remarkable human being, except in the way that we are all remarkable. His life has no great significance, but for better or worse it is his life, years piled upon years all leading to a grey twilight. But in that twilight he manages to find a stubborn spark of hope, and that spark lights a fire that burns in strange and beautiful ways in his life and the lives of the people that love him.

For more reviews like this check out HumanEchoes.com

In his book Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield posits that there is a moment in the evolution of every language where conditions are perfect for a masterpiece to be born. It's a moment when a majority of the speakers of the language fully understand how it works, but the "rules" have not yet been chiseled into stone. There exists a perfect balance of structure to build upon without the rigidity of form.

Doubtless Mr. Barfield would object to his philosophy being applied to the slasher film genre in general, and Silent Night, Deadly Night in particular, but the application is apt nonetheless. The 80s were a perfect storm in the evolution of cinematic language of the slasher film. The films that preceded that time had not completely codified the tropes of the genre, and the films that followed were necessarily works of imitation and deconstruction. But at the exact balancing point between chaos and convention, Silent Night, Deadly Night emerged, whole and complete and perfect in every way.

The story opens with a typical family going to visit their grandfather in a mental institution on Christmas Day. He sits in his wheelchair, seemingly catatonic, until the rest of the family leaves little Billy Chapman alone with the old man. Then he begins to speak, whispering to Billy that Santa Claus rides out each year, not only to bring presents to the good children, but to punish those who have been naughty even once.

Later Billy's family stops to help a man in a Santa suit who has broken down by the side of the road; but the man turns out to be a robber who brutally murders Billy's mother and father right in front of him.

As the years pass Billy has an understandable fear of Santa Claus, despite having blocked the specifics of that night from his young mind, but the Mother superior at the Catholic orphanage where he is raised believes the best way to treat his phobias is by administering ever more stringent discipline, forcing Billy's fears ever further inward. This song of psychological trauma finally crescendos into madness when an adult Billy is asked to wear the garb of a department store Santa Claus.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is fascinating because of the line it walks between bowing to the tropes of the 80's slasher film, and making its own way. On the one hand it indulges in violence for violence's sake, killing off amorous teens and stereotypical bullies in increasingly gruesome and creative set pieces. Take those scenes out of context and it could just as easily be Jason Vorhees or Freddy Krueger lopping off heads and impaling nubile teens on mounted antlers (do you get it? She's horny). But context is everything. And Billy Chapman is not like Jason or Freddy. His backstory is not painted in a broad strokes flashback narrated by the people he's about to slaughter. We see how he got to be this way. He's not a supernatural, unstoppable force. He's just a guy who's been taken beyond the breaking point by the cruel twists and turns of life.

Silent Night, Deadly Night drags the subversive truth of how we view slasher films into the cold light of day; it knows we aren't really cheering for the stupid teenagers. It knows that on some level, the killer is the hero of the film. Silent Night, Deadly Night does away with beating around the moral bush and makes the slasher the main character.

And it succeeds on more than a theoretical level. The cinematography here is beautiful; the framing, perfect; the set design, spot on. The actors could easily be forgiven for mailing in their lines in such a bizarre movie, but instead their performances bring even more depth to these characters. In particular, the role of the Mother Superior could have easily devolved into a cartoonishly evil caricature, but instead Lilyan Chauvin brings a depth to the character that makes her seem real and relatable.

Silent Night Deadly Night entered the world in a storm of controversy. Critics panned it simply for its subject matter, believing that it was an attack on Christmas and Santa Claus and all that was good in the world. But for all of its gore and gruesome violence, Silent Night Deadly Night isn't a mean-spirited movie. It's a story about a boy who lost his way and eventually lost his mind, in the dark days of what should have been season of cheer. And it's a dirge for every time the true spirit of Christmas is lost in the shadow of selfishness and cynicism.

For more reviews like this, check out HumanEchoes.com.

There's a faded blue car on the side of the road by the beach. At first you think it might just be parked there, but then you notice the grass growing up around the wheels and the makeshift awning attached to one of the doors. Look a little closer still, and you will notice that some of the spots of rust in the fender aren't spots at all: they're bullet holes. This is a car that has seen things. It has been touched by violence, and it has sat in the same place for so long that is has forgotten how to move.

This is the never ending cycle of violence and revenge. This is Blue Ruin.

Blue Ruin is not a film that accepts easy classification. At its most basic level it's a revenge movie about a man who goes after the thug who killed his parents years ago. But there's no satisfaction to be had in this revenge, no big explosion-laden payoff. In fact the revenge itself happens fairly early in the film setting off a chain reaction of events that send our protagonist on the run for his life.

To say more would be to stray into serious spoiler territory, but the overriding theme of the movie is that revenge is never an isolated incident. There is no single moment when justice is served and the hero can ride off into the sunset. There is always another side, someone else to be sucked into the cycle of violence. It doesn't start where you think it starts, and it doesn't end where you think it ends.

And that's a message that's all the more important in these days of war and terror. We live in a world full of people with perfectly good reasons to hate each other. Time and again we convince ourselves that this time we can hit back hard enough to stop anyone from ever hitting us again. But we can't. And while violence and revenge may seem satisfying in the short term, they will ultimately do irreparable damage to our bodies and souls.

Macon Blair's incredible understated portrayal of the protagonist, Dwight, makes this into more than just a sermon. The character is distinctly and purposely drawn, neither an invincible hero nor a vanilla everyman. He is a walking contradiction, weak and yet somehow strong, fearful and yet somehow brave. His single-minded determination is simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking.

Blue Ruin is perfect. Every shot, every color, every moment has purpose and power. There is not a single frame wasted, not a shot out of place. Watch it for the love of cinema. Watch it for the love of life.

To read more of our thoughts on Blue Ruin and other films check out HumanEchoes.com

The Gift isn't strictly speaking a horror movie, but it is a movie about ghosts. No, not the translucent specters of the dead, but the ghosts we live with every day, the echoes of our decisions, both good and bad, and how they affect us years later, change our lives, define our identities.

The story begins with Simon, a well-to-do lawyer running across Gordo, an old acquaintance of his in a chance encounter after moving to a new town. Gordo starts stopping by Simon's house unannounced, dropping off little gifts, chatting with his wife, Robyn. There's nothing inherently menacing about any of these gestures, but Simon begins to suspect that there's something just a little off about Gordo. Robyn believes Gordo is just trying to make friends, but Simon insists that something is wrong.

To delve further into the specifics of the plot would risk spoiling a deftly plotted mystery. This is a film that is best seen with as little information as possible, partly because the very genius of the story is how it plays on the audience's ingrained preconceptions. The element of mystery isn't just a gimmick leading up to a cheap twist. It's a tool that's used in the indictment of the viewer, a device that forces us to consider how we choose who to trust and who to dislike. The film doesn't just present a skewed perspective, it makes us complicit in accepting that perspective.

The Gift is reminder that the past isn't a thing that simply disappears. The things we have done come back to haunt us when we least expect it, and though we might change how we look and where we live, the core of who we are often remains unchanged, for better or worse.

From a technical perspective, The Gift is yet another example of why Blumhouse is such a powerful presence in the world of genre horror today. There's nothing too showy or "big budget" happening here, but the impressive filmmaking craftsmanship on display serves the story perfectly, and the lead actors all bring incredible nuance and subtlety to their characters.

The Gift is a thriller and a mystery, but it's also a character piece. It's a lesson about how difficult it is to truly know someone, how difficult it is even to know ourselves. It draws us in and then makes us think, and it holds up a mirror to our souls.

For more reviews like this check out HumanEchoes.com

Beasts of No Nation is not a film to be seen lightly. It will not warm your heart, or lift your spirits. But it should be seen. Because it reminds us of where evil comes from in the world.

The story opens with Agu, a young African boy playing "imagination TV" with his friends, looking through the empty frame of a television set at the world around them. It's both a perfect way to set up the character as playful and innocent, and a deft metaphor for what the movie itself is trying to do. We're looking through a frame at reality. The frame might focus our attention on one thing over another, but this is really happening somewhere out there, beyond the safety of our television screens.

Agu lives a happy life with a happy family, but there are rumblings of trouble in the distance. Soldiers patrol his seemingly peaceful town, and his father talks of a fighting force on the move toward their home.

And all too soon, the war is no longer a hypothetical thing happening out of sight, it is real and present, gunshots and explosions tearing through Agu's old life and sending him on the run into the bush.

Out in the wild, Agu stumbles across a contingent of men led by the charismatic Preacher. They recruit Agu into their fighting force with the promise of revenge against the men who attacked his village. They put a gun in his hand. They teach him to kill. They teach him to hate.

Agu becomes a soldier, in every possible sense of the word. He joins in the murders and atrocities perpetrated by his company with an almost religious fervor. And yet he is still just a little boy, who longs to escape from the endless horror of war to go and do little boy things once again.

With Beasts of No Nation, director Cary Jo Fukunaga once again proves his considerable talent, but aside from one or two notable exceptions, there is not an overabundance of style in the film. This story is rough and brutish and true, and Fukunaga wisely avoids using too many directorial flourishes that might detract from the weight of what is happening on screen.

Likewise the performances from Idris Elba and child actor Emmanuel Affadzi are heartbreakingly real. In particular Elba's portrayal of Preacher, a character who could have easily been a caricature of a villain, is instead terrifyingly human, yet another somber reminder that the evil men of the world are still men. And those men were once boys who played and laughed and loved and were loved.

Beasts of No Nation is a hard movie to watch, but it's message is critical. Ultimately it is not only a tale of child soldiers in Africa, but a warning to people of every country and in every time.

Evil is learned. Hatred is taught. But love and good can be taught as well.

Read more of our reviews at www.humanechoes.com

Blade is not a subtle movie. It practically runs on the rule of cool. Everyone is in black leather, swords are the best way to kill, and immortal beings somehow still act like twenty-something douche- bags.

There's a lightness in the plot that's hard to overlook. Vampires apparently just become evil when they turn, making it easier to cope with the efficiency that Blade kills them with. As a character, Blade himself doesn't have much depth, although Wesley Snipes brings a certain gravitas to the role that makes this easy to overlook. Less easy to overlook is the pretty-boy villain, who might as well be the trope-maker for the Marvel Villain Who Could Have Been Really Cool, But Fell Short of His Potential.

But as easy as it is to pick holes in the logic of what's happening on screen, in retrospect, Blade was arguably one of the most influential movies of its day. It came out the year after Batman and Robin had bombed its way onto the screen. Batman and Robin represented the worst way Hollywood could look at comic book movies. It was silly, childish, without weight or import. "See how silly this Batman fellow is!" it said to the viewing public. "That's because comic books are really for kids, not for serious grownups like us!"

And with that movie fresh in people's minds, Blade stormed into theaters and set the whole thing on fire.

In some senses Blade shares a bit of its basic DNA with Batman and Robin. The story is relatively simple, the lines between good and evil are starkly drawn, there is very little nuance to any of the characters. This is still "comic book" story telling.

But on the other hand it broke ground for what a comic book movie could be. For one thing it definitely isn't for kids. The hard R, ultra-violent action is clearly aimed at a more mature audience, and it soared at the box office despite ignoring the younger demographic. the same audience that would flock back to the theaters in the next year to see more heroes in black leather fighting the forces of evil in The Matrix. This wasn't a comic book movie; this was an action movie.

And maybe more significant is the presence of predominantly black protagonists. This isn't a "thing" in Blade. They don't have some point to make about racism. And the fact that it's so casual about it, makes the lack of black-led superhero movies even today, seem even more glaring by comparison.

It's also worth mentioning that despite coming on the heels of a comic book movie that nearly everyone hated, and despite being an R- rated superhero movie, Blade did crazy business at the box office, topping 70 million dollars domestically and 130 million worldwide proving there was still life in the genre.

And so, despite not being a great movie on its own merits, when placed in the history of comic book films Blade is a Colossus, standing astride two eras of film-making. It has one foot planted in the silliness of the past, and another planted in another era, an era we arguably still haven't reached even today, an era where the whitewashed and watered down superhero movie is a thing of the past, an era in which comic books are most decidedly not for kids.

Blade is an echo from the past, an influence on the present, and a vision of the future.

(Editor's note: I love this freaking movie with zero guilt and no regard for what it did for comic book movies…Wesley Snipes killing vampires with a samurai sword is awesome)

To hear more of our thoughts on Blade check out Episode 165 of the Human Echoes Podcast. www.humanechoes.com

If Batman mated with the truck from Stephen Spielberg's Duel (don't tell me that isn't physically possible, the man can beat Superman, he could figure it out) nine months later one of them would give birth to something that looked like Night Fare.

At first blush, Night Fare is a movie about an evil car, a vengeful taxi hungry for its fare. But as the story unfolds it reveals new and surprising layers of complexity.

Two friends meet in Paris two years after a mysterious event forced one of them to go on the run from the law. They celebrate their reunion with a night of partying and revelry, and when the party's over they take a taxi home. But at the last minute they stiff the taxi driver and make a run for it. It's a simple prank, a fleeting moment of drunken foolishness, but the taxi and its mysterious driver proceed to hound them through the streets of Paris, running them down side roads and back alleys, seemingly out for revenge over the lost toll.

But slowly it becomes clear things are not so simple. The taxi and its driver aren't just out for payback, and the toll the two men owe is far higher than the fare for the cab ride.

Night Fare is not a subtle movie. Our first glimpse of the taxi draped under a blood red silk cloth is accompanied by a driving synthetic soundtrack, and when the mysterious driver pulls away he reveals a man lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood. "Be afraid of this car" the movie tells us.

And so when we see that same car roll up to pick up our protagonists we already know they're in for trouble.

night-fare-1-e1444236412846From that moment the tension never really lets up. The taxi and its driver come after the two men with an unstoppable, almost supernatural, force. As the night goes on and every safe haven the men turn to is eliminated, they're forced to face a moment they thought they had left behind for ever.

Night Fare is a cool movie, and the driver is a great antagonist. He's nearly always shrouded in shadow, a hulking silhouette that seems more like an avenging angel than a flesh and blood man. He may be a bad guy, but all of the people he targets (including our protagonists) are worse. So when he rips through a room full of gangsters with a katana, we start to side with him. And in time the movie rewards us for that instinct.

There's a moment at the end of Night Fare seemed certain to ruin the movie. It is a scene of pure exposition, telling us exactly what the taxi driver is about, where he came from, what his motives are. And it's told with a cartoon.

It shouldn't work. It breaks all the rules. When you have a cool unstoppable vigilante with an evil car, giving every single detail of his back story in an info-dump right at the end of the movie ought to be the worst possible thing you could do.

But somehow it works. It works because it leads into something else, something that ties everything together in a way that couldn't have been possible without it.

Night Fare starts out like a slasher flick with a car in the role of the slasher, but it slowly turns into something else: A story of redemption.

Read more over at www.humanechoes.com

The last movie I saw at Mile High Horror Film Festival was easily one of the best. He Never Died is a story about a man outside of his own time. An immortal tough guy / bingo enthusiast named Jack (Henry Rollins) is targeted by goons after helping a friend escape an attempted debt collection. If you've seen the trailer, you know that this really doesn't go well for the bad guys.

Jack is a complete social outcast. He follows a routine every day. He eats at the same diner, he walks, he plays bingo and when forced to talk he tries to be as vague as possible. He's completely walled off, and only the efforts of his until-recently estranged teenage daughter and the waitress of his favorite restaurant can get anything out of him.

At its core, the movie is a brutally violent look into a small slice of an unending life. The isolation and loneliness are palpable. Jack tries to blend in and go unnoticed, avoiding all connection when he can since it will inevitably end in pain. More than that, he seems to be the magnet that attracts suffering to those around him.

We follow Jack as he weaves a web of destruction through bad men and the good people in his own life. At times he seems to be completely without empathy. He is selfish, but in an effort to keep those that he would hurt away.

Despite the dark nature of this film, it is quite funny. Moments of levity are sprinkled in with violence and it helps to keep you engaged. There were many times when the theater erupted into laughter, only to be silenced moments later in reaction to the bodily horrors being witnessed. The actual horror comes from the damage inflicted by Jack, but also the damage he takes. At one point you see him performing surgery on himself in full gory detail. The effects are perfect and deliciously disgusting.

This movie stood apart on a weekend filled with revenge flicks and grotesque examples of human nature. Henry Rollins's performance was a clinic on cold anger and silent frustration. His reactions showed a boiling desperation that occasionally overflowed into furious violence. He made a character that could easily be wooden or unlikable into one of the best featured in the entire MHHFF.

I would highly recommend He Never Died to any horror fan. It's not a movie to scare you, but the action is very well done and Steven Ogg (GTA V, Better Call Saul) is a great bad guy. Rumor has it that this will end up being a series of movies. I really hope so, I'd love to spend a few more hours in Jack's world. Lord knows he'll be spending quite a few more hours in mine.

For more reviews like this go to humanechoes.com

When people say a film has more style than substance, it's generally meant as a criticism. But in the case of Darling, it couldn't be higher praise. Darling is the story of a girl and a house. The girl has been hired to house-sit for a rich woman, and the house she's hired to stay in has a bit of a sordid history. "I probably shouldn't be saying this," the rich woman says, in a tone that says she's more than happy to be saying it, before launching into the tragic story of the previous girl who worked there and met an untimely end by hurling herself off the balcony to the street below. With that bit of ugliness planted firmly in our minds, the girl is left alone to look after things. Most of the beginning of the movie is taken up with the girl's exploration of the house. She wanders slowly from one room to the next, pushing open doors inch by inch, as if they were made of marble rather than wood. In another movie, this seemingly aimless exploration might become tedious or boring, but director Mickey Keating's incredible artistry keeps the tension high, even when nothing much is happening. The stark black and white images are haunting and beautiful, and the discordant soundtrack sets our nerves on edge. The plot, such as it is, begins to take form when the Girl meets the Man, a chance encounter that sets the soundtrack jangling, and split second images flashing across the screen, echoing the girl's visceral reaction to the man. Again the editing and soundtrack do most of the heavy lifting, putting us in the girl's emotional space, making us see this seemingly normal guy, as an awful monster. The girl follows the man to the place where he works, and when she goes back to the house all of her nightmares are about him. Lauren Ashley Carter is incredible in the role of the girl. She has almost nothing to say, and very little to do for much of the film, but her haunted and haunting eyes are more unsettling than a whole legion of monsters. She is less a character than an archetype: the Woman in the Haunted House. She does not behave in a way that makes logical sense for a human person, but that is all part of the atmosphere of dread which Darling is weaving. Darling walks a fine line between being an artsy experimental film and delivering a genuinely creepy horror experience. The bleak black and white images, the dissonant soundtrack, and the jarring edits, they all work together to create a real atmosphere of tension and dread. Of all the movies I saw at the Mile High Horror Film Festival, this was the only one that really and truly frightened me.

Landmine Goes Click is an emotionally brutal experience. The monstrous darkness of the human soul is on full display. But for all of that it is a powerful story, and one you should see, if you have the stomach for it.

The setup for Landmine Goes Click is simple: Daniel and Alicia are engaged to be married and they're spending the last days of the their engagement hiking in the mountains of Georgia (the country, not the state) with their best friend Chris. But their vacation turns into a nightmare when Chris steps on a landmine. They're miles from nowhere and he can't move even a fraction of an inch for fear that the mine will explode.

Daniel heads back to civilization leaving Alicia and Chris alone. Alicia tries to dig a trench that might allow Chris to jump to safety, but after several hours, she's exhausted and not very far along. Then a local Georgian man named Iliya who had been hiking in the mountains shows up, and Chris and Alicia beg him to help them.

At first the man seems nice enough. Yes, of course he'll help. Yes, of course he'll do what they ask. Except…it's only fair that he receive something for his troubles, no?

And so he begins to play a sadistic and gut wrenching "game" with Chris and Alicia. I won't go into too much detail regarding that here, but suffice it to say that Landmine Goes Click should come with a huge trigger warning.

There's nothing gratuitous or exploitative about this sadism. It is nothing more than raw human cruelty taken to its worst extreme. And it's somehow made worse by the fact that Iliya isn't a cackling psychopath. There's an earnestness in his cruelty that makes it difficult to process. This isn't a monster. This is something worse.

After he's had his fun, and the landmine has been dealt with, Iliya leaves Chris and Alicia behind, and the story jumps forward in time.

Now we see Ilyia at home. He has a wife and a daughter. He tends bees. It's hard to reconcile this man with the sadist we've just seen ruin two lives. His life is fairly normal, his family seems happy.

And he doesn't hear when the friendly American traveler comes to the door asking for directions. Of course it's Chris. And of course, he's out for revenge.

Now the tables have turned completely. It's not just that Chris is now taking control from Iliya. It's that we see him as the monster now, and Iliya as the all too human victim.

This is the gut punch message of Landmine Goes Click: normal people, "good" people even, are capable of terrible things. We are all equally prone to cruelty and compassion.

The craft on display in Landmine Goes Click is incredible. The actors play their parts with gut-wrenching depth, particularly Kote Tolordava's horrifyingly human depiction of Iliya. The script brings an incredible amount of tension to of a story that essentially takes place in two locations, and the cinematography is confident without being too showy.

Landmine Goes Click could have easily devolved into a gory exploitation flick, or a triumphant revenge story, but wisely shuns both of these paths. No one wins in this struggle. There is no hero to ride off into the sunset.

This is a story of the hidden blackness in every human heart.

It hurts to watch. But it should not be ignored.

For more reviews like this go to HumanEchoes.com

Applesauce is the story of a man named Ron, his wife, and their friends. It kicks off when Ron calls into a skeezy talk show to tell the worst thing he's ever done.

Before he can spit out his story he's interrupted, but the talk show and the subject of Ron's call come up again that evening when Ron and his wife meet with their friends for dinner.

After some cajoling and stalling Ron eventually tells the group the story of how back in his college days he accidentally severed a man's fingers by slamming them in a heavy door.

And once the story is over and the couples have gone home, the fireworks really kick off as the question "what's the worst thing you've ever done" is asked and answered in ways that are both comedic and tragic by turn.

And then someone starts sending Ron body parts.

That tone of comedy and tragedy echoes throughout the rest of the movie, alternating between bitter and sweet in a way that leaves the viewer more and more on edge as the film progresses.

The characters are interesting at first, funny, smart, and seemingly sophisticated. But as the plot unwinds we start to see that under the veneer of charm these are all deeply flawed, and generally despicable people. The adults in this film are children in grown up clothes. They're petty and selfish and spiteful at every turn.

To give any further summary of the plot would lead both to spoilers, and to a review several thousand words long. The story morphs and meanders from one thing to another in a way that doesn't immediately make sense. But slowly a theme becomes clear, a riff on the idea of retaliation endlessly leading to more retaliation. Applesauce is like the jazz graces its soundtrack: wild, improvisational, and unexpected as it tackles its theme.

Unfortunately the narrative and theme both overstay their welcome. The latter act of the film is badly in need of trimming, and it seems apparent that the filmmakers don't fully trust their audience to get what they're driving at. So much so that after too many examples of offence begetting offence, Ron flat out tells us the moral of the story, as if this were a Very Special Episode of some kids TV show.

But for all of its faults I can't dislike Applesauce.

It probably helps that it's really really funny, often in surprising ways (though again near the end of the film we've grown weary at laughing at such despicable people).

There's nothing artful here, no cinematic beauty to admire. The camera hovers close in on faces for long shots that are occasionally slightly out of focus. There is nothing pretty or appealing. This is an ugly story about selfish people.

It's a tough pill to swallow, but a heaping spoonful of comedy helps the medicine of Applesauce* go down.

*I still have no idea what's going on with that title though.

For this review and many others, go to HumanEchoes.com

This is the age of the blockbusters. Huge bombastic films with expensive effects and elaborate set pieces where the fate of the world is in peril from the forces of evil, and only a small band of heroes can save us from certain doom.

These are tales with global scale and universal peril. The terrorists must not get the nukes. The super villain must not open the wormhole. The mad scientist must not complete his Super Death Ray.

These are not easy stories to tell. All of the pieces must fit together, the effects must be seamless, the cinematography dynamic. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people work together, and many millions of dollars are spent to create a single work of art. And still the result can be a flawed and disjointed mess.

But what happens when you take all of that away? What happens when you throw out the beautiful sets, do away with the special effects, and fire your superheroes?

What you have left is a movie like Locke. One man, in one location, dealing with a crisis so personal that the motorists he passes on the freeway as he drives couldn't care less whether he succeeds or fails.

And telling that kind of story is harder still.

Here, there is no spectacle to distract us, no fight scene for us to cheer for; all we have left is drama.

"Drama" is a word that's been simplified and bastardized to merely mean "exciting", but there is so much more to it than that. Drama is that chemical reaction that happens in a story when when a character's greatest inner strength is drawn into conflict.

That scene in the last season of Breaking Bad when Walt and Hank finally faced off in Hank's garage? That was drama. No one was shot. No dinosaurs ate anyone. Cthulhu did not awake from his slumber. Instead it was about one man's purpose being stymied by another. Hank's indomitable will to bring his brother-in-law to justice coming into conflict with Walt's threat to bring him down with him if he falls.

If the character's principles are weak, or if the conflict does not clash with those principles convincingly, the drama is lost.

Locke may be the most dramatic film I've ever seen. The titular character is unbending in his principles, determined to live up to the ideal he has made for himself.

And as the story progresses, the challenges his he faces to keep that ideal intact grow exponentially. First his livelihood, then his family, and finally the work that he loves are all brought into peril by his decision to do what he believes is right and honorable, to right the wrongs he has done, to be the man that his father never was.

Ivan Locke is a bird in a hurricane, first buffeted, then grounded, but never deterred from his course by one inch.

This is Tom Hardy at his finest, not strutting about as a super villain or raging through the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but breathing life into one extraordinary character.

Locke isn't just determined. He's broken. He's spent his life resenting his father, building a shell of principles around himself in order to avoid being like the man that failed him. He is honest, literally to a fault, unwilling to bend the truth even to comfort the terrified mother of his bastard child as she goes into early labor.

And yet, in spite of these things, he is loved by his family and respected by his peers. This is a man they have all come to rely on. And when his world begins to fall apart, their worlds threaten to crumble along with it.

Doubtless this film is not for everyone. It is not particularly "fun"; it is even possible that some will find Ivan Locke's actions and attitudes to be morally reprehensible. And maybe they aren't wrong to think so.

But for my part this is a beautiful portrait of humanity, tragically flawed, yet incredibly strong, facing off against the everyday terrors of life.

This is a story about something more important than the fate of the world; it is story about the fate of one man's soul.

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