Escape Room (2019)

Premise: Six strangers find themselves in circumstances beyond their control, and must use their wits to survive.

Escape Room was a fairly decent thriller for about 2/3s of its runtime. For the other 3rd, it was pretty rote with underdeveloped characters, derivative set pieces, and an ending that felt like a first draft fever dream.

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Glass (2019)

Premise: Security guard David Dunn uses his supernatural abilities to track Kevin Wendell Crumb, a disturbed man who has twenty-four personalities.

I can’t remember the last time I was so invested in 2/3s of a movie only to find myself struggling so hard to hold my interest in its final act. But such is the life of the audience member of an M. Night Shyamalan movie. As harsh as it may sound, there’s no denying that Shyamalan is one divisive and mercurial filmmaker. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs were all fantastic films in my opinion, and The Village was solid. But we had to suffer through the likes of The Lady in the Water, The Happening, and The Visit before he turned things around with Split in 2017.

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Unbreakable (2000)

Premise: An ordinary man makes an extraordinary discovery when a train accident leaves his fellow passengers dead—and him unscathed. The answer to this mystery could lie with the mysterious Elijah Price, a man who suffers from a disease that renders his bones as fragile as glass.

It may be easy to forget that M. Night Shyamalan’s follow up to his breakout hit The Sixth Sense came at a time when the vast majority of comic book movies were poorly made garbage to sell merchandise. But before Christopher Nolan really changed the game with The Dark Knight Trilogy, Shyamalan made a grounded comic book movie that was, at its heart, a love letter to comic books themselves and the storytelling within that medium. Underappreciated in its own time, Unbreakable went onto attain cult status and still holds up to repeat viewings to this day.

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The Upside (2017)

Premise: A comedic look at the relationship between a wealthy man with quadriplegia and an unemployed man with a criminal record who’s hired to help him.

The Upside is a pretty middle of the road comedy that’s fairly inoffensive, if unimaginative in its execution. It’s a remake of the 2011 French film The Intouchables. It premiered at TIFF in 2017 and finally got a wide theatrical release now in 2019.

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