Green Room is gut-wrenching, sometimes literally

 

Blue Ruin, Green Room. 

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is certainly not a director afraid to deal in primal colors: the bright green woodlands of Oregon into which down-on-their-luck punk band The Ain’t Rights stray, playing an impromptu gig to an audience of neo-Nazis; the visceral red of the horrific gore that results when band member Pat (an endearingly mumbly Anton Yelchin) stumbles upon a murder.…

Pressure never quite plumbs the depths

 

You can tell from its opening moments that Pressure is a film that means business.

Opening with text that warns us about the dangers of deep sea diving – as anyone knows who’s ever seen The Abyss – it manages to strand its crew (read: cast) on the bed of the Somali Basin, almost 700 feet below the surface, within twenty minutes.…

I loved The Falling

 

How do we categorize ambition in a film?

It has to mean more than scope or scale — Avengers: Age of Ultron is big and bold but what new does it attempt in terms of storytelling, apart from maybe giving Hawkeye something to do?…