Sharp Corner

This was waaayyyy too long. It would've been better as a short film, not the 110 min runtime that felt like four hours. It just dragged on and on with the same exact premise and predictable outcomes. When you're a salesman but was born a first responder. Ya, we get it.

And as a fan of Ben Foster, not sure why all the critics are praising his performance (or the film for that matter)... it was flaccid and any actor - even inexperienced, could've pulled off his character and stale demeanor.

It's a generous 5/10, mostly all going to the smoking hot Cobie Smulders for her excellent and convincing performance.

It just moves along at a snails pace. I like the setting, the idea/story but it's just so slow. I like the direction the story goes but it's an agonizingly slow journey getting there. There are literally scenes of nothing for minutes at a time and you start yelling at the screen "C'mon something happen!" There are I believe three brief exciting scenes in the nearly two hour runtime. Several times throughout the movie I zoned out from boredom. A fairly original idea is what got me through to the end. I will say all the acting was top notch but as I said before it was just too slow. So was I entertained? Well, yes... for about 1\4 of the movie. Which is not nearly enough.

Dramatic thriller "Sharp Corner" charts the descent of average family guy Ben Foster (fine actor) from hating his job, thru leaning on booze, to sheer insanity via the titular accident blackspot outside the new home he's bought with wife Cobie Smulders and their young son. As cars repeatedly crash, and folk die, on his front yard, Foster becomes obsessed with the victims and on prepping to 'help' future ones, rather than preventing them and/or addressing his family's trauma. Writer / director Jason Buxton's second film is original, clever, well performed - tho also slow & implausible at times, with an ending that'll irk some. That said, generally, it's a good film.

On another platform I was looking for a comedy/thriller and that's what this movie was categorized as. Well it's not a comedy so I was disappointed. But on here it was categorized as a thriller, which again turned out to be wrong, so disappointment again. It's just a drama, and not even a good one. It's just too long before anything interesting happens and then it's just the end, which was too abrupt and again disappointing. The acting was okay so no real complaints about that but with decent actors alone you can't guarantee the movie will be good. For that you need an interesting story and this one was just not one of those.

I first heard about Sharp Corner in one of those "upcoming trailers" things you see on YouTube and it stood out as something unique, so I kept a note to watch it. The trailer was somewhat misleading, as there's not a whole lot of action to the movie, but it is an extremely tense psychological "thriller", a word people will debate. I was actually impressed! Ben Foster has gotten very good at playing weirdos.

There are a lot of moments of just someone standing around, looking around, sitting and thinking, but it never actually felt boring to me. There was always a building tension, the feeling that something might happen at any moment, because that's what the family was feeling. I was impressed with how well they did with a very minimal movie. I have a few complaints. The major standout was the CGI, which was only for a five second scene but it just didn't hold up to modern film standards. I also felt like the couple just...never felt like a couple. I also get annoyed by kids in movies, they rarely ever feel authentic, but that's a personal gripe.

Maybe I'm being a little generous, but I'm giving the movie an 8. It's much better than I was expecting.