Red Lights

Written & Directed by: Rodrigo Cortés
Full credits at IMDb

The latest from the director of Buried wants to be an amazing, far-out horror-mystery like Angel Heart—right down to its small-but-crucial part for Robert DeNiro—but it's campy bananas instead. Cillian Murphy and Sigourney Weaver star as paranormal investigators who expose frauds and debunk tech-savvy charlatans when not teaching their college class in Magic's Biggest Secrets Revealed. But strange events suggest that maybe these skeptics are wrong! Could the answers lie with America's most famous, possibly legit psychic (DeNiro), who happens to be coming out of reclusion after several decades?

Red Lights is super-serious and strange: it nearly climaxes with a newsreel-like detailing of laboratory experiments; it takes place in an alternate universe in which faith healers and their critics generate front-page, top-of-the-fold headlines...

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The Pact

Written & Directed by Nicholas McCarthy
Full credits at IMDb

The first scene boasts one of the best-conceived scares I've seen in years: a woman, home alone, wanders her house, holding a laptop, trying to get an Internet connection so she can video-chat with her young daughter. Finally, she gets a clear signal. "Mommy," the kid asks, "who's that behind you?" And the connection cuts out. It's a lot like the classic look-into-the-mirror-and-see-somebody's-behind-you scare, updated to exploit recent technological advancements. It ought to be lifted by every other horror movie this year until it becomes an insufferable cliché.

Writer-director McCarthy shows quite the command of horror-form in this haunted house-serial killer genre mash-up, his feature debut, particularly a facility with Shining-esque tracking shots down hallways. (He also makes the effort to put a clever spin on clichés; a Ouija board scene works much better when the board is scrawled on the floor of a closet.) The whole movie's creepy as fuck. When the first real jolt arrived 20 minutes in, I literally got goosebumps—and I couldn't even tell what I was looking at. It's that well-crafted.

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