Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, M. Night Shyamalan‘s latest leads the charge of new releases. Yes, it’s Knock at the Cabin going up almost unopposed for top honors, though a release release gets a new edition. Read on for more…
Knock at the Cabin
Knock at the Cabin is one of the steadier of Shyamalan’s recent works, making it easier to recommend than usual. Plus, Dave Bautista, having a good week in cinemas right now with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, is quite strong here. This is some of what I had to say from my review (here) at the time:
To me, it has been a bit since M. Night Shyamalan had made a film that I could fully embrace. It’s probably The Visit, though if I’m being a bit strict, it’s all the back to The Village, when Shyamalan’s new efforts still excited and satisfied me. That’s a long slump, though some have obviously still enjoyed his other works. You can tell he’s getting back to basics though with Knock at the Cabin, stripping down spectacle to lean into an impossible premise. The result is a largely successful effort that highlights what the filmmaker does best.
Knock at the Cabin sees Shyamalan mostly stick to what works. Less reliant on a twist than normal for him, it’s more about seeing whether the narrative goes left or goes right. It almost makes the film seem straightforward, even though there’s a central mystery afoot. By keeping things close to simple, it lets his ability to generate tension really shine through.
Also Available This Week
All Quiet On The Western Front (Blu-ray)
The House Made of Splinters
Yellowstone: Season Five, Part 1 (TV)
Branded to Kill
From The Criterion Collection: “When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin) tells the ecstatically bent story of a yakuza assassin with a fetish for sniffing steamed rice (the chipmunk-cheeked superstar Joe Shishido) who botches a job and ends up a target himself. This is Suzuki at his most extreme—the flabbergasting pinnacle of his sixties pop-art aesthetic.”
Stay tuned for more next week…
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