It’s hard to talk about Verity without comparing it to The Housemaid from last year. Both erotic thrillers based on bestselling novels in which a young woman comes into the household of a married couple, flaring up some sexual tension with the husband while tormented by the wife; and to top it off, both are directed by filmmakers previously known for comedies. In such a situation the one that comes after will always look more than a little derivative (even though Colleen Hoover’s novel Verity predates Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid by four years). It’s an unfortunate hand, but one that probably should be disregarded. In the literary world this subgenre of thriller is thriving -it is certainly not the last of these kind of movies we are going to see. And besides all that, Verity is ever so slightly the better film. Perhaps that is feint praise, the movie is still very contrived and trashy (a feature, not a bug), but it has a few more compelling layers than its elder cousin film -ev...
I'll say this for Alejandro G. Iñárritu -he comes closer to the mark of Dr. Strangelove than Adam McKay did . Feint praise, but it's not nothing. We are living through times that defy satire. There is very little in the main narrative of Iñárritu's new film Digger that feels legitimately outrageous. Its premise, its characters, and even their bluntness about their own amoral priorities feels substantially less shocking or scandalous than they might have even twenty years ago. Mocking the clowns in power and how they will destroy the world is an exercise that has lost its sting. It's not that it is too close to home, it's that it lacks sufficient hyperbole. Perhaps that is why Digger tries so hard to cultivate humour in broader ways, ways that Iñárritu is not particularly adept at. The actions at play themselves don't feel ludicrous enough, so colouring them in overblown performances and gross-out comedy may be the way to accentuate them. A trigger-happy U.S P...