Gone Girl (2014) Review
Gone Girl (2014) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Gillian Flynn adapted her own novel and took a hammer to her own third act. Fincher shot it entirely in one small Missouri town for sixty-one million dollars,…
Tag: Unreliable Narrator (Page 2)
1980sAmerican Psycho (2000) Review
American Psycho (2000) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Mary Harron read a novel everybody called unfilmable and found the comedy in it. Made for seven million dollars, mostly in Toronto, and it is far funnier and…
1970sA Clockwork Orange (1971) Review
A Clockwork Orange (1971) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kubrick makes you enjoy a monster's company, then cures him, then asks whether the cure was worse. Withdrawn from Britain by its own director for nearly thirty…
1990sThe Usual Suspects (1995) Review
The Usual Suspects (1995) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A confession improvised from the noticeboard behind the detective's head. The twist survives knowing it, which is the only test that matters.
2000sAtonement (2007) Review
Atonement (2007) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A thirteen-year-old tells a lie and two lives end. The last ten minutes do not reveal a fact, they change what kind of object you have been watching.
AmbitionAll About Eve (1950) Review
All About Eve (1950) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The best script ever written about ambition, in a film where everybody is intelligent and nobody has to be dim for the schemer to win. Fourteen nominations,…
1980sAmadeus (1984) Review
Amadeus (1984) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Not a biography and not trying to be. A film about a competent man given exactly enough talent to hear genius in somebody else and never produce it himself.
1970sTaxi Driver (1976) Review
Taxi Driver (1976) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Schrader wrote it living in his car after a divorce, and the film never once steps outside Travis Bickle's head. The narration sounds reasonable. That is the horror.
Book ReviewsThe Tell-Tale Heart
A murderer insists on his sanity while his telling betrays his madness, in the definitive unreliable-narrator story. In barely two thousand words Poe builds unbearable tension to the famous confession. A masterpiece of Gothic horror and a perfect compact classic,…
Book ReviewsThe Girl on the Train
A blackout-prone alcoholic narrator becomes entangled in a missing-person case she may have witnessed from her commuter train. A gripping, twisty page-turner built on genuinely unreliable narration, with a messy, unlikable heroine whose dysfunction is the point. Strong entertainment, a…
Book ReviewsAtonement
A child's catastrophic lie and the lifetime spent trying to atone for it, spanning a 1935 English estate, the retreat to Dunkirk, and wartime London. Beautifully written and structurally daring, with a final turn that reframes the entire book and…
Book ReviewsGone Girl
On the morning of his fifth anniversary, Nick Dunne's wife vanishes, and what follows reshaped domestic suspense: dual unreliable narrators, a mid-book reversal both shocking and scrupulously fair, and a savage look at marriage and performance. A masterclass in structure…