![]() It's the detective thriller as foreboding white noise machine. The film has no ups or downs, just a flatline of disquiet connecting one identically inflected moment to the next. Reptile drones through its mystery, almost daring viewers to zone out, perhaps in hopes that we might miss a few key details and walk away thinking we've seen something more suggestive and complex than we have. Is that lawman strategy or essential temperament? There's much more intrigue in the actor's carefully subdued delivery than what the whodunit provides. He downplays everything, raising an eyebrow but never his voice, even when threatening the man flirting with his wife. Del Toro, especially, draws you close with his understatement. Beyond the polished imagery, it's the performances that prop Reptile up. He has an expert eye for the evil lurking in the cracks and crevices of suburban life. ![]() The cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, supplies some of the same creeping menace he previously lent films by Jordan Peele, David Robert Mitchell, and M. Juice Newton was born Judith Kaye Cohen on 18 February 1952 in Lakehurst, New Jersey and grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia. In fact, the movie often plays like the work of someone who caught Zodiac or Gone Girl on cable years earlier and is trying to recreate it from memory, getting some of the sickly sleekness down but remaining foggy on the specifics. The clipped editing, seedy overhead illumination, and periodic plunges into file cabinets mark Reptile as another entry, like The Little Things or Prisoners before it, on the growing log of David Fincher imitations. He stages scenes just like a guy who cut his teeth on music videos: obsessed with surface effect, less so with how well his story tracks from one carefully composed image to the next. Making his feature debut, director Grant Singer fits a profile, too. And what gumshoe wouldn't turn his magnifying glass on Eli Phillips (Michael Pitt), a townie who pulls the classic serial-killer move of appearing among the gaggle of onlookers outside the crime scene and holds a grudge against Grady's local real-estate dynasty? Eli also has the misfortune of being portrayed by Pitt, the frequent onscreen creep who gave TV's Hannibal and the English-language Funny Games remake some additional notes of distress how obvious the movie will become hinges partially on whether he's the culprit or an easily profiled red herring. There's a dirtbag ex-husband (Karl Glusman) who looks like a police sketch personified, with his pencil stache bracketed by sharp cheekbones. We can't rule out the boyfriend, thanks to how close to the chest Timberlake plays his emotions. The pool of suspects is small but almost comically filled with plausible psychos. Though her tenure at the top of the charts proved short-lived, Newton's gifts as both a singer and songwriter produced several enduring pop and country hits that extended her career for decades.Seasoned detective Tom "Oklahoma" Nichols (Benicio del Toro) catches the case and works it, very gradually. After a lengthy hiatus in the early 1990s, Newton returned to recording with several independent releases that were well received by her fanbase. The album generated six Top 10 country singles, including the chart-topping "Make You Mine" and two other No. With longtime musical partner Otha Young, she penned two huge pop-country hits in "Angel" and "Queen," which were quickly followed by the equally polished "Love's Been a Little Bit Hard on Me." The songs, which drew equally from classic country and '60s-era studio pop, quickly minted Newton as a Top 40 artist, though she struggled to maintain the billing in subsequent years before shifting to a purely country format for the massively popular Old Flame (1985). ![]() A favorite among both country and pop audiences in the 1980s, singer-songwriter Juice Newton enjoyed crossover success throughout the decade with such country-rock hybrids as "Angel of the Morning," "Queen of Hearts," "Love's Been a Little Bit Hard on Me" and "You Make Me Want to Make You Mine." She toiled in obscurity for most of the 1970s, recording three largely unheard records as Juice Newton & Silver Spur, before striking out on her own in 1981.
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