frighten

Director R Balki must have got a kick out of writing this very enjoyable poison-pen letter to film criticism in which a Mumbai serial killer stalks the practitioners of our noble profession. Se7en-style, the killer tailors the murders to the critique; woe betide the hack who thoughtlessly writes: “A picture whose heart is in the right place, but whose other organs are all over the place.” Not only is this premise a droll kick up the arse for the Scream-style meta-slasher, it has to be the first film in which someone says…

If Naomi Watts is going to do anything in a film, it’s going to be portraying a tortured soul. A veteran, and a highly underrated one at that, has spent her career, from Mulholland Drive to Dream House to The Desperate Hour, making us endure the tragedies that befall her with excruciating realism, painstaking screams, and bloodshot eyes. Now, if there’s anything Watts loves doing more than playing tortured characters, it’s playing tortured characters in an English-language remake of a foreign-language thriller film that…

As if the tumultuous din of battle is not horrendous enough, over the ages humans have discovered plenty of ways to exploit sound in warfare. I found an astonishing variety of ancient acoustic weapons while researching my book "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Unconventional Warfare in the Ancient World." Deploying sound in war has evolved over millennia, from natural animal sounds and music to today's advanced sonic devices.…