No. 44 Midnight Special (2016) 66 of 100
This is Shannon’s 4 th of 6 collaborations with the writer and director Jeff Nichols. We have previously looked at the pair’s work on ‘Shotgun Stories’ and ‘Take Shelter’, both of which offered some appeal. This effort came after those previous two, but before ‘The Bikeriders’ which we also enjoyed. In this one we open in a cheap motel with a news alert about an abducted 8 year old child. The suspect is named as Roy Tomlin and a picture of Shannon pops up. We then see that Roy is watching the TV in the company of the abducted boy and with another man. The hotel room has cardboard taped over the windows and it is clear that something odd is going on, but it’s not clear what. Elsewhere two cult members are on the hunt for the boy, just as their service gets raided by the FBI. The Feds have been tracking the cult as they’ve been buying a lot of guns and some of their sermons contain embedded government secrets. It turns out that Shannon is the boy’s father and he and a...