The most overlooked performance by a lead actor in 2011 was Michael Shannon’s performance as the delusional Curtis LaForche in the Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) bone-chilling drama Take Shelter. Though Shannon’s acting career began in 2001, and the first three movies he appeared in (Pearl Harbor, Vanilla Sky, and 8 Mile) each grossed over $100,000,000 at the box office, it wasn’t until 2008 when he earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor after two jaw-dropping scenes as a mentally unstable man in Revolutionary Road.
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Category Archives: Mystery
Reservation Road (2007)
Despite its 37% rating on www.rottentomatoes.com, I found Terry George’s (Hotel Rwanda, The Boxer) to be a thrilling and captivating drama about the loss of family, moral responsibility, and the guilt a human being can become rattled with when committing an unthinkable crime that you become more and more confident that you are going to be able to get away with. While this movie did poorly at the box office (just over $100,000…no, not $100,000,000), it stars three Academy Award nominees, including Jennifer Connelly, who won Best Supporting Actress in 2002 for A Beautiful Mind.
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Melancholia (2011)
After being thoroughly disappointed by Terrence Malick’s tone poem The Tree of Life, I was hesitant to watch Melancholia after watching its similar artistic trailer and hearing comparisons between the two movies. However, unlike The Tree of Life, which I went to see thinking would be a good movie, I decided to view Melancholia because some were calling it the best performance of Kirsten Dunst’s (Spiderman, The Virgin Suicides) career. While Dunst was deserving of the praise, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the experience of Melancholia.
Deception (2008)
Continuing to get my Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine, Incendiary) fix, I caught the directorial debut of Marcel Langenegger, 2008’s Deception. While captivating initially with its slow, almost methodical building of suspense, this movie ultimately tries to outsmart itself by offering twist after twist after twist. By the time the movie crawled to its conclusion, we either figured out the twists, or they were so far-fetched and ridiculous that we didn’t care about them.
The Ledge (2011)
The Ledge is one of many movies with a trailer that hooked me and made me think the film would be terrific. I reevaluated my decision when I saw that it made just $ 5,000 at the box office and earned a whopping 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. Unfortunately, as I was updating my Netflix queue, I saw it was already coming to my house. So I gave the movie a chance that very night it arrived, thinking I’d have it on, but I would probably be glancing at it while doing some work online. However, I gave it a chance, and it hooked me. Usually, this type of movie would be one I would mock (see below). But for reasons unknown, the story caught me, and while the situation did get a little absurd, I didn’t see it as being unreasonable because of the characters and what drove these characters.