48 Movies Like The Portable Door (2023) (Page 4)

Staff & contributors

All the little twists in the case of Mirna Salihin's murder are intriguing enough to speculate over, so Ice Cold is definitely a true-crime case worth revisiting. The problem is in how the documentary indulges sensationalist arguments and pure speculation with the same level of urgency as it does with expert counsel. A large part of the film has to do with how this trial started to become such a fixture in Indonesian public life, but it feels as if the movie would rather provoke even more baseless conspiracies through its gossipy tone than provide smarter analysis. There's an appeal to how simple this case is relative to other true-crime stories, but this shouldn't be an excuse to haphazardly throw opposing perspectives at each other for the sake of drama.

Genre: Crime, Documentary

Actor: Edi Darmawan Salihin, Jessica Wongso, Marcella Zalianty, Mirna Salihin, Otto Hasibuan

Director: Rob Sixsmith

Rating: PG-13

After his brother's gruesome death at the infamous drug den, Trap House, Detective Grant Pierce is removed from the case to find its creator. He goes rogue and recruits a teenage drug dealer working for the Trap House with a plan to infiltrate. Whatever the film lacks in intrigue is not compensated by good writing or interesting traps/scares/twists that would befit its horror categorization. Even expectations to match its counterparts in the escape room genre are quickly lowered thanks to uninventive traps and shallow characters whose deaths weigh nothing in the grand scheme of the plot. The potential of a trap house horror/thriller to comment on addiction, race, poverty, or anything substantial outside of "crackheads are crazy" is ultimately wasted. Instead, there's stilted dialogue, caricatures of drug addicts, and a narrative that is hard to sit through, much less enjoy. 

 

Genre: Crime, Horror, Thriller, TV Movie

Actor: Anthony Timpano, Benjamin Wilkinson, Bruce Crawford, Fletcher Donovan, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Jaime M. Callica, Jason Tremblay, Peter Bundic, Ryan Mah

Director: Nicholas Humphries

, 2023

For some people, grief isn’t easy when a parent dies, especially if that parent is someone you wish you would never become. Grief can stir up a mix of uncomfortable emotions, like shame, anger, and guilt, and it can be very confusing to explain what’s happening to people who aren’t experiencing the same. There’s plenty of that here in South African drama Prime, with Marius losing his racist father, but the way the film depicts this grief is quite hard to follow because of the way it handles its other genres. The human horror of becoming someone you’ve hated is muddled with the randomly arranged sequences, sluggish pace, and mumbled dialogue, which is a shame, because the ideas and images could have made a better movie.

Genre: Drama, Horror, Thriller

Actor: Gérard Rudolf, Jasmine Hazi, Michael Lawrence Potter, Nomsa Twala, Richard Gau, Sharon Spiegel Wagner, Sizo Mahlangu

Director: Thabiso Christopher