The Resident

No roundup for this week's releases because there were only three new films released this week and one of them was the new Tyler Perry film that I happened to have missed. Also, there really is no point in trying to pick a best film for a week that doesn't even have a decent film, let alone a best one.

 The Resident is an old fashioned b-movie that, had it been headlined by less well known actors than Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilary Swank, it would have gone straight to DVD. And that's probably the most interesting thing about it. I have nothing against generic obsession-thrillers but, solid performance aside, The Resident goes right past generic and straight to lazy, banal and uninspired. The story about a young doctor who movies into a too-good-to-be-true apartment whose flirtations with the building's handsome landlord lead to something far less innocent is nothing we haven't seen before but the film's biggest problem is that it never once bothers to even try and deviate even a little from what we, as an audience, have come to expect from such a plotline. The direction is lifeless, the twists obvious, the thrills unthrilling and the whole film played it too safe and too sane to ever be any fun at all. Ah well, at least it was short.