Director, writer, and star Frederick Keeve demonstrates a strong imagination but a weak sense of dramatic ability in his feature The Accompanist, a story about a gay piano accompanist who becomes infatuated with a male ballerina amidst a series of tragedies that befall both men.
In The Invisible Man, the titular character – once a spooky Universal Classic Monster – receives a contemporary reimagining by writer/director Leigh Whannell.
Pontypool is one of my favourite movies, even though I really dislike its post-credit sequence. It’s a random bit that looks like a deleted scene from Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City series, featuring obscure characters that we haven’t seen before exchanging hard-boiled dialogue – it’s moody nonsense. It makes as much sense as the entirety of Dreamland, a pseudo-fantasy-noir that has the gall to ride the coattails of Pontypool; squandering the reunion of its filmmakers and…
The High Note is an enjoyable romantic dramedy with charming performances and some great tunes.
Fresh off the festival circuit, Hlynur Pálmason’s A White, White Day rapturously yet bleakly explores familiar themes of grief and loss. Pálmason’s second feature offers a clinical, appropriately distanced character study, while maintaining a coherent sense of the character’s interiority.
Military Wives has been tailor-made to be a crowd-pleaser. The ingredients are there: the leading characters have an entertaining dynamic that plays on their opposite personalities, they lead a team of underdogs, nostalgic pop tunes are worshipped amongst the film’s kind-hearted humour, a strong patriotic backbone holds up a story that’s been loosely based on real events. As much as it bugs me that the filmmakers believe they’ve cracked the code to pleasing general audiences…
Audiences have been spoiled with unique period films – Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar winner The Favourite, and Greta Gerwig’s take on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. We’ve been shown that these rustic movies can exist outside of a formula, which makes Autumn de Wilde’s Emma a bit of a retrograded step. But, the conventional choices can be explained.
Sometimes, a filmmaker will come up with a unique, unprecedented concept and turn it into a one-of-a-kind feature. More often than not, however, the concept confounds the creative; leading to a muddled mess that disappoints the viewer even more than the average bad effort. Case in point: The Roads Not Taken. It’s the latest film from once-celebrated English filmmaker Sally Potter, a woman who once managed to turn the perplexing Orlando into a film, which…
The Incoherents is a charming, if somewhat cheesy and predictable, comedy that follows four forty-something men who attempt to revive their dreams of rock stardom by reuniting their old band.
