I suppose I liked the idea that being generically a true crime thriller on some level, and there's not really jeopardy through extraneous serial killers, and guns and knives and stuff.
"We want a high-level thriller writer, somebody who understands Michael's work," Mr. Burnham said.
At this point the film moves from love story into something more akin to a street-level espionage thriller.
But what puts flesh on the bones and raises Mitchell's writing above the run of gangland thrillers is its psychological level, which shows the fearful long-term ramifications of the loss of a child.
No surprise, then, that the films share a director in Spanish B-movie ace Jaume Collet-Serra, who amps up the whodunnit mechanics of this airborne thriller to frankly deranged levels.
On one level, this thriller-romance reads as a Caledonian Da Vinci Code, albeit one written by an award-winning poet – but the deeper quest is for friendship, in a novel that offers a corrective to Buchan's ideas about patriotism and national identity.
His three novels exploring the despairing logic of Islamic fundamentalism have a scorching, almost visionary intensity that raises them above the level of political thriller to something more like Greek tragedy.
A "reinvention" of the 2003 French film Nathalie, Chloe attempts to add a veneer of respectability to this seemingly seedy enterprise, as a strong cast (Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson) and a half-decent third act bring it to a level most erotic thrillers can only dream of – it would almost be enjoyable if you had seen it on a plane and all the sex was cut out.
These stories (and a few nonfiction entries) work on one level as mini-thrillers, each of them energized by characters who must solve the central mystery of why they are present in the story in the first place.
Forget De Niro piling on weight for Raging Bull – Bale's startling weight loss for this 2004 psychological thriller took method acting-committment to a new level.
