15. Stranger by the Lake Directed by Alain Guiraudie Written by Alain Guiraudie France Though Stranger by the Lake premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival (and appeared on Sound On Sight’s best of 2013 list), it finally reached North American audiences in January of this year. Alain Guiraudie’s stunning noir-tinged thriller is …
Picking the best movies that come out in any given year is no easy feat. For film fans, a quality feature can come out at any time, from any one, and discovering an enjoyable and well-crafted feature is truly a pleasure. As we reach the halfway point of the year, many excellent films have already …
There is that old adage that states if one does not stand for something they very well could fall for anything. Well, this apt sentiment certainly applies in co-writer/director Kelly Reichardt’s simmering eco-terrorism thriller Night Moves. Methodical, moody and breezily reflective, Reichardt’s suspense piece has a slow-footed pacing but registers with quiet resonance in its message about lingering environmental indifference and the retaliation against the establishment that allows for such blatant negligence.
What separates life on the fringe of society from being outside of society entirely? It’s that line of demarcation that fascinates Kelly Reichardt, whose particularly American take on “slow cinema” collides with our own expectation of the requirements of the thriller genre in Night Moves, which cleverly cloaks its true thematic concerns in familiar story tropes.