Fright Night (1985)
William Ragsdale plays Charley Brewster. Fright Night operates as one of the most successful horror-comedy productions of the mid-1980s and a foundational text for the teen-protagonist-with-aging-mentor horror tradition.
Director: Craig Gillespie
Craig Gillespie directed Lars and the Real Girl, a film whose premise sounds like a cruel joke and which is played with complete sincerity, and that instinct for taking a mocked figure seriously has continued through his career.
I, Tonya reframed Tonya Harding as a class story and won Allison Janney an Academy Award. Cruella gave a Disney villain a punk origin nobody asked for and executed it with more style than the assignment required.
The tonal control is the skill. Several of his films sit a step away from being unwatchable and none of them fall in.
