Three Films Make A Post: From the Executive Producers of

Actually Happened! Most Terrifying Psychic Phenomena. Psychic Research Team Report. Relived. (2004): Its title is clearly the most exciting thing about Jun Tsugita’s short in minutes but long in tedium attempt at POV horror. If you like watching paint dry, you’ll just love watching a guy in an apartment doing nothing while nothing happens. Well, alright, there’s a ringing doorbell and various things only our protagonist can see, and the very end of the thing has a decent jump scare, but this material would maybe add up to a ten or fifteen minute short. Fifty minutes of additional nothing are not great.

The Free Fall (2021): I know, Adam Stilwell’s weird, twisty little movie is not to everybody’s taste, but I found myself buying into this tale of amnesiac shenanigans, dreams, and Shawn Ashmore being creepy. Andrea Londo’s protagonist reacts entertainingly to the increasingly bizarre shit surrounding her, while Stilwell uses his – clearly very small – budget to create a mood of the very peculiarly dream-like out of little more than creative camera work, consciously strange acting from his cast, and some very bizarre ideas. I also really loved the sub-genre twisting (or is it revealing?) shift for the final act that’s just too fun to reveal.

Pronto (1997): You need to put a lot of effort into screwing up a crime movie based on an Elmore Leonard novel. Fortunately, this Showtime movie doesn’t make this wrong kind of effort, and writer Michael Butler and director Jim McBride get by nicely on Leonardisms and a very nice main cast that consists of Peter Falk (who seems to have a lot of fun, as he so often looked in the latest stage of his career), the always underappreciated Glenne Headly and James Le Gros as the first screen version of Leonard’s Marshal Raylan Givens. The plot skips along nicely, character traits and foibles become important for the plot in ways one wouldn’t necessarily expect, and there’s a very Leonardesque sense for the complicated morals of people living outside of the mainstream of law and morality. Plus, it’s often very funny indeed.