Face of Evil
Face of Evil, the feature-length debut from writer/director Vito Dinatolo, is a poorly paced and unremarkable horror-thriller that is more frustrating than frightening.
Like Father
Having co-founded Hilarity for Charity with her husband, along with appearing in a handful of comedies (For a Good Time, Call…, Sausage Party), Lauren Miller Rogen flexes her filmmaking muscles in her directorial feature debut Like Father, Netflix’s latest dramedy.
Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
If you have ever read Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet or have seen the 1995 documentary based on the book, you would know quite well that Hollywood was full of closeted queer individuals working as actors, directors, producers and everything else; trying their hardest to live their truest lives, while also keeping the truth hidden. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood tells another side of that story.
Generation Wealth
Inspired by her catalogue of photography and her award-winning documentary The Queen of Versailles, Lauren Greenfield set off to encapsulate global obsessions of self-value in her latest doc Generation Wealth. However, if you ask me, Generation Wealth has not only been inspired by Greenfield’s career and questions about society, but also by various unfinished stories seeking closure.
Shock and Awe
Woody Harrelson, James Marsden, Jessica Biel, Milla Jovovich, Rob Reiner, and Tommy Lee Jones. These actors all play key parts in Shock and Awe, a political drama Reiner directs. Unfortunately, they’re all overqualified for this generic vehicle.
Wylie Writes @ TIFF ’18
TIFF returns for another year, pushed along by their Tuesday announcement of gala and special presentation films. This first slate has the same level of films that frequently find their way into the earliest announcement: films that will eventually be nominated for Oscars, or be ignored for Oscars, or find their way into hot take articles about how they should have been nominated for Oscars.
Angels Wear White
While it isn’t a perfect film, Angels Wear White is a bleak, meditative examination of girlhood and power.
Our House
Our House graduates from the “Paranormal Activity Institute of Small and Effectual Scares”. Actually, if we’re rating this supernatural horror against the Paranormal Activity series, it’s on par with the first two films, and ranks higher than the franchise’s final two chapters. For what it’s worth, that’s a decent sweet spot for Anthony Scott Burns and his feature-length debut.
Future World
For as rambunctious as Future World is, it’s awfully dull. This disappointing joint effort comes from directors Bruce Thierry Cheung and James Franco, although considering how successful Franco has been as a director, I wonder if he was hired to guide Cheung. Nonetheless, both filmmakers fail at establishing this tattered reality, which falls somewhere between a hellscape and a subsisting rebirth. The survivors also seem to be an uneven mix of copied characters from other movies.