thriller

I don’t understand how James Cameron undid so much of what was great about the first film, added a load of stupid new stuff, and it still came out as brilliantly as it did.

In the pantheon of 90s Grisham adaptations this one sits in the middle, some way below The Firm. The cast is overstuffed and even 135 minutes isn’t enough to find work for all of them. Voight is good value as Drummond, full of expensive false courtesy, and DeVito might be the best thing in it as Deck, the paralegal who keeps failing the bar. Claire Danes is good too, stuck in a subplot with no route back to the insurance case; the film keeps setting the trial down to go and check on Kelly Riker. The rest is genre-by-numbers, and it’s no surprise I forgot that I’d already seen it until I was a fair way in.

The biblical rain today suggests that summer is over, so my run through a handful or so of John Cusack films ends with it, on the film I’ve seen more than perhaps any other.

Watching Cusack in order suggests some connections I hadn’t gone looking for, mostly around moral compromise and concession. David Shayne in Bullets Over Broadway concedes his way down one compromise at a time, and pays for it. Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out concedes nothing and is ruined anyway. Runaway Jury‘s Nick Easter turns up with the con already written and walks out clean. Martin Blank does the worst thing any of them do, announces he’s stopping, and nobody argues (or even really appears to be listening).

Even the reunion corridor scene (fantastic choreography, btw!) doesn’t hold him to it. Debi refuses every justification he offers, he ends up admitting he got good at the job and then came to like it, and the admission expires the moment the scene does.

Nothing about what Martin does accumulates, or is left owing, which is presumably how I’ve managed however many viewings this is. The film has never once asked me to reach a verdict on a contract killer. I find that… restful, which I doubt reflects well on me.

Corporate thrillers are my thing, and ones set in broadcasting doubly so. Mann films the CBS half with the tension he’d normally give a heist: lawyers, standards meetings, the slow discovery that the network absolutely, in fact, will fold. His characters keep fucking up their own shit on principle, and I’ll watch that every time. Crowe is very good as Wigand, all clenched jaw and short fuse. Pacino does a lot of stock Pacino, which is fine by me. But Christopher Plummer’s Mike Wallace is the best thing in it, vain and shrewd and a lot better at his job than anyone in the room wants to admit. At 157 minutes it isn’t flabby, though nobody would miss, oh, let’s say, fifteen of them.

This review may contain spoilers.

Marty Mauser is a confidence man, and the film is built almost entirely out of his energy: when he talks the world seemingly rearranges itself around him. I spent the whole thing wanting him to fail to the point where it coloured my enjoyment of the film.

Some of that is the Safdie method pointed somewhere new. In Uncut Gems, Howard Ratner was unbearable in a similar way, but he was prey: always the smallest man (figuratively) in the room, owing money to bigger ones, hunted through every scene. The sympathy was more structural; you root for anything being chased. Marty has the wind behind him. He gets the components of the underdog (small man, big rivals, sport as the ladder out) while functioning as a predator on everyone within reach. I didn’t enjoy the mismatch.

The consequences do arrive but they’re a little more bureaucratic rather than escalating: too late to enter the Championship because of his own scheming, flying home with GIs because he’s burned his passage, missing the birth of his son. Every closed door in the last act is one he built himself.

And he never seems to notice. He talks his way past each of them exactly as he’s talked his way past everything else, right up to demanding a real rematch with Endo. The confidence man suddenly insisting on the genuine article, perhaps the neatest trick he pulls and, like me, if you aren’t charmed, the one worked on the audience rather than by the character.

Which leaves the recognition nowhere to happen except that final shot: hands clamped over the mouth that ran the whole con, glasses still on, weeping at a baby behind glass in a room full of other people’s children. It’s beautifully played, almost entirely through containment. It’s also the only available location for a humbling the film never dramatises anywhere the camera can see, and the readings I’ve come across all say the same things: trading fame for family, coming to terms, the repercussions sinking in, etc. I don’t agree. He didn’t trade anything. He ran out of options and then cried where nobody could watch him do it. And anyway, who’s to say fatherhood isn’t the next scheme he’s going to try to exploit?

Saw this at the cinema in 1999 and, I think, never since. Memory had filed it as Rashomon-adjacent, with unreliable narrators and contradiction; on reflection the three strands complete each other rather than compete. A different and altogether gentler trick. Mostly it’s a time capsule of faces I then assumed were headed for bigger things: Scott Wolf, Desmond Askew, Taye Diggs. A very young Melissa McCarthy turns up briefly. And obviously Sarah Polley, whose subsequent career rather outstrips the material here. Watchable, propulsive, thoroughly of its moment. And I say that as someone who considers the turn of the millennium to be a few years ago, not twenty-six.

Third in the summer’s John Cusack rotation, and the first where he’s actively running the con rather than absorbing someone else’s. Nick Easter arrives with the whole thing planned, and the fun is watching him work rather than watching him decide.

Which makes him the odd one out. David Shayne in Bullets Over Broadway trades his principles away a concession at a time. Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out is ruined for a compromise he never actually made, done for standing in the room. Even Martin Blank, who at least chose his profession, spends Grosse Pointe Blank trying to reverse out of it. (Incidentally: one of my favourite films. Cannot wait to rewatch it.) Here, Easter is the one who got there first, and knew what he was doing when he did.

The film belongs to the excellent Hackman. Rankin Fitch (a name that simply screams “Grisham adaptation”) with his wall of monitors is doing what Cusack usually does: playing it straight while everything around him gets sillier. And, of course, the plot gets sillier by the minute.

Hoffman, sharing a screen with Hackman for the first time in their careers, is somehow given nothing to do. I’ve seen this film before but had very little memory of it, and I suspect that will be the case again should I ever press play once more.

Segel and Weaving are clearly having the time of their lives, trading insults with the ease of a couple who’ve had years to sharpen them. The best running gag is physical: injuries accrue and stay, so by the closing stretch Segel genuinely looks like a man who’s been through everything the film has put him through. War of the Roses crossed with cartoon splatter, and mostly a delight. Less charming is the mid-film swerve into a rape threat played for tension. It doesn’t land, and the film would lose nothing without it. Plenty of fun regardless.

Inspired by a Guardian ranked list, I’ve decided to spend the summer rewatching John Cusack films—I’m not sure why, but I’ve been rather obsessed with him for about 35 years—and where better to start than one of the most insane films of the 90s. It was intended as an action film, but it works far better in hindsight as a dark comedy: a postmodern blend of Top Gun, The Rock, Speed, and Face/Off, celebrating and unwittingly sending up those sorts of films by sheer excess.

An absurd premise, stacked cast, bonkers juxtapositions of scene, score and dialogue, an audience set up to cheer for a cannibalistic child killer’s escape to freedom… I ought to watch this more often. Cusack plays his honest, moralistic US Marshal straight as the madness unfolds around him.

Kaufman’s least immediately legible film, and potentially his most rewarding for it. I didn’t clock how the Jake scenes and the janitor scenes connected until the credits rolled, which may be the point or may just be me being slow—either way, I want to come back to it, just not yet. I suspect a lot more clicks if you’ve got the full reference shelf to hand (David Foster Wallace, Pauline Kael, Wordsworth, A Beautiful Mind, the musicals, etc), rather than catching half like I did. Buckley and Plemons are fantastic, and Collette and Thewlis match them on a fraction of the screen time.

The plot creaks and Cruise does his earnest-sprinter routine, but the real pleasure is watching Pollack assemble the deepest supporting cast of the decade. Hackman (weary, rueful), Hal Holbrook’s avuncular menace, Ed Harris doing more with a sigh or a “fuck!” than most leads manage with a monologue, Holly Hunter stealing twenty minutes outright, plus Strathairn, Brimley, Busey, Tobin Bell, Sorvino, Dean Norris: every door that opens, someone you recognise walks through.

Most of Riz Ahmed’s acting happens through his eyes—Ash barely speaks aloud, his lines passed through a telephone relay operator. That constraint sharpens everything, and it’s all gruff exchanges, mailed packages and payphone protocols. Then the ending arrives, and it crumbles. A script this fastidious about process shouldn’t ask you to swallow quite that much.

Uses each of its 160 minutes. Digressions into folklore, a severed leg inside a shark, Jaws, Carnival, yet it’s compelling throughout. Moura anchors the sprawl with a fantastic performance. The real achievement is textural: the 1970s Recife of the dictatorship years is rendered so completely, with all the grain, the cars, the sweat-damp collars, the paranoid zoom-ins that you’d hope for. You’d believe it was unearthed from a vault rather than shot last year.

I expected a materialistic thriller and I got an iPhone ghost story about grief. Quietly great!

I’m not always the biggest Tarantino fan. The cleverness is too often the point, the references fold in on themselves, the secondary meaning always matters more than the first. But I’ll say this: he makes a hell of a good movie now and again.

20-odd years since I last saw this and I can only watch it through two modern lenses: roguelikes and LLMs. None of us knows what happened; we’re all just dying and resetting for each new run. And Leonard’s context window is tiny; the Polaroids are his system prompt.

Watched on Sunday March 1, 2026.

My gateway to the Coens. A VHS buy sparked by an Empire review. From there it was Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and The Hudsucker Proxy in quick succession—possibly the same week.

Since then they’ve made slicker and more audacious films, but this remains my favourite.

Watched on Saturday February 14, 2026.

There is absolutely no need for either Damon or Affleck to be in this, although they do improve it.

100 minutes spent rooting for one of the worst guys

First viewing in maybe 15 years?

Chases the Heathers energy but adds a few too many plot twists and minutes.

The Game by way of The Truman Show and The Running Man. A weird one. Either a ⭐️⭐️ high-concept throwaway comedy or a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ portrait of deep, lonely paralysis. Maybe both, so I’ll meet in the middle.