Movie picks for these isolated times
YHere are 10 movies to watch that take place in confined spaces.
THE TERMINAL (2004) Tom Hanks plays an Eastern European tourist who gets unwittingly caught up in bureaucratic glitches after his homeland erupts in a fiery coup. After surrendering his passport, he finds himself stranded in JFK International Airport as the days turn to weeks, then months.
WAYDOWNTOWN (2000) Four office workers make a bet for one month’s salary to see who can go the longest without going outside. As the friends navigate the mazelike core of downtown, they start to unravel in their own particular ways as the yearning for fresh air starts to take its toll.
THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985) A brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse. Five dissimilar teens meet in Saturday detention and bond over music, pranks, a little bit of weed, and sharing secrets.
EX MACHINA (2014) Alex Garland’s sci-fi fantasy stars Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, a young programmer who is invited by his CEO, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), to his secluded private mountain retreat, where he encounters a humanoid AI creation in the form of a robot girl named Ava. As the two interact in the claustrophobic atmosphere, the true nature of Nathan’s plot comes to light.
10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (2016) A survivalist’s bunker is the setting for this edition of the Cloverfield franchise. After a car accident, a young woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up in the underground shelter of a doomsday prepper (John Goodman) and another survivor (John Gallagher Jr.). As she pieces together the apocalyptic events, she soon finds that the information she is being fed may not be the truth.
LOCKE (2013) Set entirely inside a BMW with only one character onscreen, Locke is a riveting journey with Tom Hardy as a married man who is informed that the woman he’s had an affair with is about to give birth. The next hour-and-a-half is spent on speakerphone with the various people in his personal and professional lives as he attempts to keep his job on track and confess the betrayal to his wife.
MOON (2009) Sam Rockwell stars as an astronaut on a three-year shift at a lunar outpost with a talking computer as his only companion. He is tasked with collecting moon gas that holds the key to Earth’s energy crisis. As his contract is coming to a close and he is getting ready to return home to his family, accidents and a startling discovery make him question the real reason he is there.
THE MAN FROM EARTH (2007) When a group gathers for a university professor’s farewell party he reveals that he is actually a 14,000-year-old caveman who relocates every 10 years before people catch on that he is not aging. Over the course of the evening, his colleagues interrogate him on his outlandish claim.
FREE FIRE (2016) A gun deal gone wrong turns into an hour-and-a-half warehouse shootout filled with bullets, one-liners, and double-crosses.
TWITCH CITY (1998) Don McKellar stars as Curtis, a misanthropic agoraphobe who spends all his time obsessively watching TV and dealing with a rotating series of roommates, some more odd than he. The two-season CBC series also features Molly Parker, Callum Keith Rennie, Bruce McCulloch, and Mark McKinney in this offbeat, untraditional sitcom.
More suggestions: The Lighthouse, Rope, Reservoir Dogs, Misery, The Sunset Limited, 12 Angry Men, The Hateful Eight, Glengarry Glen Ross, Rear Window, Exam, Room.g