The Departure
There is nothing charming, insightful, or engaging about The Departure, writer/director Merland Hoxha’s first foray into feature-ish length cinema (the total runtime is just a little over an hour).
Reviews
You Don’t Nomi
Jeffrey McHale’s documentary You Don’t Nomi dissects 1995’s much maligned racy drama Showgirls in a similar way that Rodney Aster’s Room 237 delved into different theories on Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. Both films are about how cult interest breathed new life into a filmmaker’s original vision, however the difference between the documentaries stems from their points of interest. Room 237 was about how movie goers have interpreted visual totems within the film. You…
The Postcard Killings
By: Trevor Chartrand A plain and passable thriller, The Postcard Killings is stamped with mild mystery and timid intrigue that ultimately doesn’t deliver a whole lot of punch.
The Dinner Party
By: Jolie Featherstone If Alice in Wonderland was a tarot card, its inverse would be The Dinner Party.
It Must Be Heaven
If you like filmmaker Elia Suleiman, you will like It Must Be Heaven. This may well be an unusual start to a review, but this is not meant for the fans, because they already know what they are getting into. For the rest of you, how would one go about describing a Suleiman film? Well, Suleiman is a rare filmmaker: he is a Palestinian who is less concerned with doom and gloom, preferring to speak…
Survive the Night
This doesn’t happen too often – two films of the same specific sub-genre being released so closely to each other. In this case, the genre is the “home invasion thriller”. One’s really good, the other is really bad. Becky, the really good one, did a great job entertaining audiences with lots of inventive action. Its comparable evil twin, Survive the Night, takes us to the upside-down. It’s boring, illogical and its most famous star, Bruce…
Becky
You have two choices: focus on what’s insufficient in Becky or praise what the production miraculously pulls off. I would rather lean more towards the latter than the former. Sure, there are details in Becky that I wish had more time to breathe. On the other hand, the film is very entertaining, and it’s a career high for one of its actors.
Last Moment of Clarity
By: Trevor Chartrand The debut film effort from the writer/director team Colin and James Krisel, Last Moment of Clarity is a very good try with plenty of room for improvement. The Krisel brothers attempt a Hitchcockian thriller akin to Gone Girl, involving a young man named Sam (Zach Avery) who, three years after witnessing his girlfriend’s death, discovers that she is still alive. Under threat for witnessing mob activity, the girl Sam knew as Georgia…
Judy & Punch
Punch and Judy are a couple of characters in a traditional British puppet show who are not exactly known for their subtlety. Punch is placed in charge of taking care of their kids. He hits the kid, his wife gets mad, he hits his wife, a cop shows up, he hits the cop, and so on and so forth. As such, it is a bit unusual that someone decided that this story, or rather the…