By: Trevor Jeffery Horror works best in extremes: if you can’t make a film that is legitimately bone-chilling, then you better make it so over-the-top that the value comes from its absurdity rather than its potential to fear. Unfortunately, non-camp horror is a hard beast to tame: you need a plot and a cast that can effectively scare people. Bite is a campy horror film at heart that tried to go full-out scare mode, and…
By: Addison Wylie Director Gabriel Carrer’s screenplay of The Demolisher is practically speechless until 18-minutes into the film. However, the audience is so acquainted with the heart-aching leads by then, that Carrer’s film could’ve gotten away with completely being a silent film. If film critic-turned-filmmaker Chris Alexander is carrying out a similar yet more minimalist approach with the horror genre, Carrer could’ve done the same with this crime thriller. Nonetheless, The Demolisher is really good. And…
By: Addison Wylie A hard day is right. Nothing appears to be going well for Detective Gun-soo (played by Seon-gyun Lee). On the eve of his mother’s burial, he hits a drifter with his car while a corrupt operation to which Gun-soo was deeply involved with crumbles away. The sudden hit-and-run has the unconventional homicide detective thinking on his toes. He stows the body in the trunk of his car and brainstorms a connecting idea…
By: Addison Wylie Cobie Smulders continues to collect indie cred with Kris Swanberg’s Unexpected, where the How I Met Your Mother actress plays high school teacher Samantha who learns of her surprise pregnancy during her final year at an inner-city school ceasing closure. At the same time, Samantha discovers one of her students is also with child (Jasmine played by firecracker Gail Bean). Unexpected doesn’t issue a new perspective on poverty-stricken pregnancies, or a new display of…
By: Trevor Jeffery There are so many documentaries covering atrocities. It’s easy, or necessary, to forget that sometimes; there is so much horror that to consider it all – all the time – isn’t healthy. The Look of Silence isn’t so much about the importance of its subject, or about squeezing emotions from an increasingly apathetic audience. It’s about humanity and acts of evil, and how people will twist their perspective to retain the last…
By: Addison Wylie Trainwreck is much more than a vehicle for rising comedic star Amy Schumer. It’s easily Judd Apatow’s strongest work as a filmmaker, evidence that Schumer’s honesty flows through her long form screenwriting, and the best romantic comedy this critic has seen since 2008’s criminally underrated Definitely, Maybe. Definitely, Maybe is a standard sort of rom-com, where Trainwreck sends home the same type of charm but also reflects contemporary pessimism towards romance. It…
By: Addison Wylie If Rob Cohen’s The Boy Next Door is an indication of anything, it’s that American filmmakers are still having grave difficulty making erotic thrillers without avoiding camp. Nowadays, it’s almost a requirement for the movie to fly off the rails. A film like The Boy Next Door often has the viewer questioning if the filmmakers were making a bad movie on purpose. A movie gullible audiences could innocently flock to and get…
By: Addison Wylie Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s film is a foreign drama that isn’t subtitled, translated, or dubbed. Every character communicates in sign language as movie goers are given the broad strokes of a crime-laden story. However, Slaboshpitsky’s screenplay is unrelenting, and leaves little to the imagination when it comes to displaying desperate and heartless activity. For the first ten minutes, The Tribe is an unforgettable, sensory depraved experience. One of the first scenes features a celebration…
By: Addison Wylie The metric system has never been more sexy or sentimental than it is in Bent Hamer’s 1001 Grams. Now that I have your attention, let’s move towards some of the drier details. Marie (played by Ane Dahl Torp) is a Norwegian scientist who is close with her intellect father Ernst Ernst (played by Stein Winge). Both of their careers circulate around the analysis of measurements, and they both discuss work during their smoke…
By: Addison Wylie As an experiment and as an escape, Suzanne Crocker and her family packed up necessities (including a video camera) and took to Canada’s Yukon Territory for nine months. Suzanne and her husband Gerard Parsons wanted their children to experience the great outdoors and witness the change of the seasons; illustrating that technology and a fixed schedule doesn’t always capture what’s really going on in the world. The trip, however, was equally refreshing…