By: Trevor Chartrand Based on a short film of the same name, The Climb was written and performed by Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin. Covino also directed the film, which chronicles the life and times of a dysfunctional friendship over the course of many years. In the film, Kyle (Marvin) and Mike (Covino) are long-time best friends who slowly drift apart – and then back together again – after Mike admits to sleeping with…
The Kid Detective has done the best job, in recent memory, explaining why a mystery’s leading sleuth is such a sad sack. The enigmatic and eccentric personality has become such a cliché in the genre, that the audience just expects and accepts the detective to be grizzled, or unhappy, or an unpredictable hot head. In The Kid Detective, Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody) carries those traits, but writer/director Evan Morgan provides compelling motivation which fuels Brody’s top-form…
György Pálfi’s His Master’s Voice is a thoroughly confusing, questionably plotted sci-fi film that is hindered by a myriad of subplots, vague ideas, and an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to combine traditional fictional filmmaking practices with mock-documentary elements.
A story of possible infidelity gets an anti-Hollywood spin in Sofia Coppola’s sophisticated dramedy On the Rocks.
Eternal Beauty is ostensibly the second film to be released in recent months in which a character diagnosed with schizophrenia struggles with the broad issues of love, family, and life. Unlike Luke Eve’s heavily saccharine I Met a Girl, where a man with schizophrenia travels across Australia to find a girl who may or may not exist, Eternal Beauty’s narrative is much more complex, even confounding, and precisely what endpoint it is seeking is vague.
The King of Staten Island is another win for director Judd Apatow, who last left movie goers with his career-best work in Trainwreck. It appears, though, that the filmmaker was preparing for The King of Staten Island with Trainwreck. Just as he gave comedienne Amy Schumer a platform to expand on her own stand-up about her self-consciousness with the opposite sex, he gives SNL comic Pete Davidson this movie to explore his upbringing in this,…
By: Jessica Goddard Despite its inexplicable first-rate cast, Blackbird is an eye-rollingly disappointing take on the terminal illness drama from director Roger Michell (Notting Hill, My Cousin Rachel). Screenwriter Christian Torpe paints with a bland palette of stock characters to slap together a narrative infested with clichés and unnatural one-liners, leading nowhere of interest.
Pascal Plante’s Nadia, Butterfly eerily takes place at the now-cancelled 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and follows a French Canadian Olympian swimmer as she participates in her final event as a professional athlete. Lovingly directed yet glacially paced, Nadia, Butterfly boasts some excellent performances and cinematography, but struggles to overcome its vague characterizations and meandering screenplay.
By: Jolie Featherstone Unjoo Moon’s I Am Woman is a loving biopic of Helen Reddy, the artist who created the iconic song ‘I Am Woman’, the anthem of the women’s movement in the 1970s.
The premise Luke Eve’s I Met a Girl, a rather poignant road trip/love story, runs the risk of romanticizing mental illness, but manages to instead provide a positive opening for neurodiverse communities.