KILL LIST

A British movie that a lot of people have been raving about. It's a cross genre picture, crime meets supernatural dealings in the English countryside (the latter a very particularly British genre), with more than a touch of domestic soap. There is something compulsively watchable about the movie, one has to see how it all turns out, and though it starts out a little leisurely, the tension builds as the story goes along. The acting (Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring, Harry Simpson) is first rate. But the story (by director Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump) is underwritten; the accents at times impenetrable; and the various genres haven't quite been finessed together well enough to make it work as well as it could. In the end, Hot Fuzz crosses the same genres and does it much more successfully, though it's much better than Wicker Man, which it is often compared to.