Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Decidedly light matinee fare that has no qualms sticking to a well-trot winsome formula, Euros Lyn’s Dream Horse nonetheless breeds charm rather than contempt for its stick-to-the-formula approach. Based on the true story of a ragtag group of aspiring racehorse-owners from a Southern Welsh community who come together to breed and train a proper thoroughfare, Lyn’s film is designed for moms that like their movies “nice”. Read More
John Krasinski’s Lee Abbott may have bit the dust in the actor-turned-filmmaker’s directorial debut but that doesn’t stop him from returning in the opening moments of A Quiet Place Part II. The scene is set as Marco Beltrami’s foreboding soundtrack creeps into our senses as a ‘Day 1’ title card slips into frame. The end is nigh but no one knows anything about the devastation barreling their way. In fact, it’s just another beautiful summer day in Small Town America. The Abbot family and their tight-knit community gather in blissful ignorance at a little league game. Marcus (Noah Jupe) is up to bat when the sky erupts in flaming streaks. Something is coming. Families break off into nuclear clusters, rushing to their vehicles, heading home to regroup. Before anyone has any sense of what’s happening, monsters reign down, killing anything that makes a sound. A quiet place is born, in flame and in blood. Read More
Jigsaw is dead but the Saw franchise continues to spiral, now with Chris Rock! The aptly-named Spiral is a bizarro world creation. One that feels like a Chris Rock-hosted Saturday Night Live Saw satire short that forgot it was a bit and took on life of its own. Frankensteining Chris Rock’s signature observational comedy stylings, the Saw series’ trademark torture gore, frenetic editing, and grizzled low-budg aesthetics, and a lazy attempt to modernize the formula by putting police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement front and center, Spiral is a crazed textual and tonal mishmash. One that thinks it has a lot on its mind but nothing of actual value to say, it’s the weird clunker of a horror reboot that can’t even prove how it ever thought the disparate elements would align to begin with. Instead, we’re left with whatever the hell Spiral: From the Book of Saw is and the layup imagery of a shit of a movie circling the proverbial drain.
It’s a natural reaction to wonder how anyone could possibly be so stupid whenever you read a headline about young Western women seduced by ISIS recruiters. To throw everything away to, quite literally, get in bed with known terrorists is a path so head-scratching – an idea so objectively poor – that it literally escapes the realm of comprehension. And yet, countless such stories exist. Women who knowingly smuggled themselves into Syria and the not-so-warm embrace of the Islamic State, where a murderous patriarchal theocracy awaits their sacrifice, exist in the thousands. Their stories, sadly, usually end the same: attempts to escape, sexual enslavement, or being stoned to death. And though journalistic queries about the 5 W’s loom large, the who, where, what, and how of their recruitment fade beneath the pressing issue of why. Why would any woman choose this? Why would any woman subject themselves to the will of patriarchal terrorists? Read More
Sometimes the relationships we forge end up creating a box around us. As we get older, inflexibility sets in, constrictions grow like wild roots; weeds overtaking the garden, bad habits poisoning the well of familial trust and security. Psychological shorthand forces us to categorize and cement versions of ourselves and others: he is always this way, this is just what she does. The boxes can be tiring, maddening even, and at times impossible to break out of, no matter the sincerity of effort or number of attempts. The Killing of Two Lovers starts in a literal box. Framed at the square 4:3 aspect ratio of the silent-era and shot under the cautious eye of cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez, our characters are immediately imprisoned, stuck in a box of their own making; their own metaphorical jailers. Read More
Little more than a collection of audio-visual horror movie clichès stitched atop a daddy’s-gone-for-the-night campfire tale, David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s The Djinn feels like a short film puffed out to feature length without the content sufficient to support said feature status. The film follows Dylan (Ezra Dewey), mute son to a late-night DJ and single father (Rob Brownstein) who decides to mess around with a haunted book and ends up summoning a djinn, which for the purposes of this film is basically an evil genie. Read More
It’s almost Christmas time in Denmark. That magical time of year when family gathers, magic happens, and, if you’re Mads Mikkelsen’s military man Markus, the body count continues to pile up. In the Danish black comedic drama Riders of Justice, when a teenage girl asks her grandfather for a blue bicycle, flap flap flap go the wings of the butterfly and one thing leads to another resulting in the “accidental” death of Markus’ wife in a tragic train accident. Returning home to care for his grieving daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), Markus’ militant ways fail to provide the emotional comfort she needs and he lashes out at the world around him, a simmering strong and silent type in desperate need of some therapeutic activity. Read More
With a dozen films under his belt, British filmmaker Guy Ritchie has dedicated his career to the criminal ensemble. From his roots directing blue-collar Cockney capers (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch) to his more mainstream tentpole films (The Man for U.N.C.L.E., King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and – to a degree – even Aladdin), Ritchies film involve crews of small-time thieves stylishly trying to land the big score. In what is both a natural evolution of his thread of storytelling and perhaps even a maturation of his themes, Wrath of Man wonders what happens after the heist has been committed. Read More
A dark, curly-haired musician wanders through a blustery, frigid no-man’s-land in Ben Sharrock’s Limbo. The man in question is indeed not Llewyn Davis, though the similarities to that Coen Brother’s characters are noteworthy. Both are men out of place, out of time even, assaulted by the realities of a society who not only doesn’t welcome them but struggles to see their humanity and worth. Read More
In William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’, a shipment of young boys escaping the nightly bombardment of WWII England crash land on a remote uninhabited island and, left to their own devices, attempt to organize rescue and their own society. Reward and punishment is doled out with the knee-jerk brashness that would conceivably come with children-led governance and their laissez-faire island society quickly turns to brutish power struggles and, soon, murder. Neil Burger’s Voyagers borrows Golding’s premise and jettisons it into outer space, stirring in a rudimentary thought experiment about control, pleasure, and autonomy, to mixed results. Read More