Brett Morgen is a brilliant documentarian as seen in Jane and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck – the latter being one of the best movies ever made about a musician. His latest endeavour Moonage Daydream, a documentary about enigmatic artist David Bowie, is cut from the same cloth as Montage of Heck but, this time, it’s billed as more of a “cinematic experience”. And, it appears that most of the production’s focus has been applied…
Anthony Michael Hall (also serving as a producer) stars as an embittered school administrator in writer/director Nicholas Celozzi’s The Class, an update of the 1985 classic The Breakfast Club (in which Hall played the nerdy Brian Johnson). Sadly, The Class never manages to grow beyond the shadow of its famous predecessor.
As much as I would love to compare David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future to his earlier horrors, I’m afraid I’m unqualified because I haven’t seen enough of that catalogue. However, I can see a contrast between the Canadian’s long-awaited return to filmmaking and his other recent dramatic work such as A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and A Dangerous Method – all of which also star Viggo Mortensen. Crimes of the Future, a gruesome…
By: Jeff Ching While watching This Land, I was reminded of 2011’s experimental documentary Life in a Day. For that movie (produced by Ridley Scott, directed by Kevin Macdonald), participants all over the world were asked to shoot a day in their lives (July 24, 2010) and the finished film would serve as a time capsule to capture a collective human experience, with the main theme of interconnectedness. This Land (executive produced by Jim Cummings of Thunder Road…
Just when you think disingenuous spiritual leaders have been satirized every which way, along comes Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. from filmmaking siblings Adamma and Adanne Ebo (the former wrote and directed, the latter produced). The Ebos offer an original perspective with their feature film debut and, despite the familiar material, the film stands as a really strong dark dramedy about redefining redemption.
As rude and unappealing Funny Pages can be, it’s a brutally honest and funny character study of a young artist who channels trauma and grief into his aspirations to be a successful cartoonist. A true tale of an unlikely opportunist.
The Good Boss offers a mannered approach to the self-destructive character study; separating it from similar company pitched in a much more frantic, anxiety-inducing tone (Nose to Tail, Uncut Gems).
Written and directed by real-life couple Dominque Braun and Terrence Martin, Get Away If You Can is a surreal, and occasionally baffling, thriller.
I can’t remember that last time I wanted to grab the reigns of a movie as badly as I did while watching Sharp Stick, Lena Dunham’s return to directing self-written material since her acclaimed HBO series Girls. With this latest endeavour, Dunham is heading in a good direction with interesting and peculiar characters and then, two-thirds through the movie, Sharp Stick takes a hard turn into another character arc that seems like an unfair trade-off…
