Elipsis Capital, June 9, 2017 I haven’t really seen a lot of college movies, honestly, but I’ve seen many movies that do little scenes from college. The modest scope of B-movie action thriller The Hunter's Prayer can be gauged by the fact that its big-time criminal tycoon (played by Downton Abbey's Allen Leech) has his international headquarters in Leeds. Even though it’s not as tidily satisfying as Get Out, it’s both darker and more ambitious, and broader in its themes. But Us also moves past such racial themes. There’s a line in there where [Elizabeth Olsen’s character] is talking about how she can see herself in the future, and she feels like a rough draft version of herself. [eyes light up] I am obsessed! Chris Cabin, The air of grievance that marks Crawford’s face in Borzage’s Strange Cargo is wonderfully used by George Cukor in A Woman’s Face, and even given a visual correlative: Crawford plays the first half of the film under ugly scar make-up covering one side of her face. How do I show that? But Lucas is a dad himself, and even paid assassins who think they are dead inside can be reminded of their honor and humanity, especially when they are in a dumb movie that needs some reason for its protagonists to chase and be chased, shoot and be shot at. Raiff and Gelula have a seemingly effortless chemistry, containing more of the warmth of friendship than the heat of romance, that sells the idea that the fast bond that develops between the two over the course of a single night (and roughly 40-minute second act) could actually be lasting. There’s no separation between your work life, your personal life, your home life, your relationship with your children, your mother, yourself, your partner. When Annie, deep in the haze of misbegotten conviction, tells her son, “I’m the only one who can fix this,” she’s trying to rectify the sense of maternal guilt she feels for her daughter’s death. Near the halfway point of Jonathan Mostow’s The Hunter’s Prayer, Lucas (Sam Worthington), a hired assassin, sits down for a bite to eat with Ella (Odeya Rush), the teenage girl whose life he spared in a moment of weakness and compassion when she reminded him of his own estranged daughter. Rather, and perhaps more dangerously, there’s an assertiveness to the way it rehashes corny lines and predictable beats, as if it’s saying that the old clichés—about men and women, about good guys, bad guys, and just deserts—are simply what works, and therefore what’s true. This is arguably her best performance. Even the format’s deficiencies, from the rickety hum of sprockets to the instability of the frame, are savored by what seems like a nostalgic impulse—a fondness for the old-fashioned that even transforms the rough, granular quality of the haunted films themselves into something like pointillist paintings of the macabre.