Green Room (2015)

The late, great Anton Yelchin stars as the bass player of a punk band who, ill-advisedly, take a gig at an isolated biker bar where — to their surprise — the clientele are all white supremacists. To their credit, their first song selection is “Nazi Punks F**k Off” by The Dead Kennedies. But if you think that sounds awkward, wait till you see what happens afterwards. The band witnesses a murder in the green room and gets trapped there, fending off Nazi punks using everything they have at their disposal (which ain’t much).

Jeremy Saulnier’s nail-bitingly intense Green Room has a gripping set-up, gruesome violence, and the soul of a punk band. The Ain’t Rights may be young and have everything to live for, but seriously, to hell with these Nazi bastards. And those bastards, led by a quietly terrifying Sir Patrick Stewart, are equal parts formidable and laughable. Saulnier resists the urge to let Green Room ever feel like a straightforward genre exercise, filling his film with memorable characters and violence so visceral that it ceases to be fun, and instead comes across as truly, painfully threatening.