Stream it on Max.
M. Night Shyamalan’s latest psychological thriller is so preposterous it makes “The Front Room,” my pick for the dumbest horror movie of 2024, look like “The Shining.” But unlike “The Front Room,” “Trap” takes itself very unseriously — God, I hope it does — and watching it was the most fun I had at a horror movie this year.
Josh Hartnett stars as Cooper, a cool dad who takes his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a concert by her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (a charisma-free Saleka, one of the director’s daughters). Cooper keeps noticing how tight security is in and around the arena, and for good reason: Law enforcement officers are there to capture a serial killer who they think is in the audience. To save himself and his daughter from danger, Cooper desperately seeks a way out.
I’ll stop there because to give away more would spoil Shyamalan’s indulgent yet effective and surprisingly unpredictable twists and tensions. (I gasped more than once.) Hartnett does God’s work, finding the right balance of darkness and comedy with material that lands somewhere between “Days of Our Lives” at its silliest and a ’70s TV action movie-of-the-week, especially in the film’s delightfully ridiculous final stretch. It’s my favorite horror comedy of 2024.
‘An Angry Boy’Stream it on Tubi.
Owen (Scott Callenberger) becomes the talk of his Queens neighborhood when a video of him saving a woman during an attack goes viral. But the celebration is cut short when a home invader assaults Owen and his mother, killing her in front of him. It turns out the violence circling Owen isn’t entirely random, and it sets him and a little boy he keeps seeing on the streets on a bloody, identity-twisting quest to right a long-repressed wrong.
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