Brandon Sklenar

Interview: Christopher Landon on directing Drop, calibrating thrills, and inverting the damsel in distress trope

First dates are nerve-wracking enough.  Going on a first date while an unnamed, unseen troll pings you personal memes that escalate from annoying to homicidal? Blood-chilling! Returning to the thriller genre with the playful, keep-you-guessing intensity he perfected in the Happy Death Day films, director Christopher Landon delivers an of-the-moment whodunnit where everyone in the…

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Film Review: Drop; Cat-and-mouse thriller easily maintains its sense of entertaining tension

However far fetched Drop proves to be with its wild, pulling-the-wool-over-our-eyes premise, director Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Freaky) and screenwriters Jillian Jacobs (Fantasy Island) and Chris Roach (Non-Stop) maintain a sense of unpredictable fun across the film’s tight 95 minutes as it presents a cat-and-mouse thriller ripe for the digital age. After opening with…

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Film Review: It Ends with Us paints its serious relationship narrative with melodramatic strokes

Whilst by no means is Justin Baldoni‘s It Ends with Us making light of its central domestic violence thematic, Christy Hall‘s script adaptation of Colleen Hoover‘s novel is unable to entirely find the momentum needed to keep such a story emotionally engaging across its testing 130 minutes. With its Pinterest-like lens on romanticising its Boston…

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