Category: Our Critics

Clint Eastwood the director, like Clint Eastwood the Western gunslinger, inhabits a world of absolutes: good and bad, right and wrong, from the audience’s perspective it’s always fairly cut-and-dried.

Hailsham. It sounds like the setting of a novel by a Brontë sister, and as the first scenes of idyllic boarding-school life unfold that doesn’t seem so far off the mark.

With producer M. Night Shyamalan’s name displayed so prominently in the advertising for Devil, it is awfully easy to forget that its director is a certain John Erick Dowdle, who sealed off a building and pumped scares into it once before with 2008’s Quarantine, the American remake of the Spanish horror film REC.

If 2009 was the summer of stale, bloated blockbusters, 2010 is shaping up to be the Autumn of Geek Heaven.