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: 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 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: Mark Barber Current representations of Sherlock Holmes are filled with weighty world-threatening stakes and explosive action sequences. Bill Condon’s more peaceful and contemplative Mr. Holmes seeks to rectify that inclination, offering a more poignant take on the famous deerstalker-wearing detective. Indeed, Sherlock’s trademark cap never appears in the film, and for good reason. Mr. Holmes is about the interplay between fact and fiction, spending much of its running time reconciling the elderly Holmes’ (Ian…
By: Anthony King GOING IN: There are a lot of films out there that help us escape our lives and live out a fantasy. For men in particular, some want to be an international spy who always gets the lady, an astronaut exploring the galaxy, a mobster in a fancy suit tossing out the kiss of death left and right… or some of us just want to be able to discard our gross bodies and be…
By: Addison Wylie Ambiguity can be a beautiful thing – especially for the horror genre. Filmmakers can inject an idea, and then trust the viewers to fill in the blanks. It does, however, take a certain skill and direction to utilize ambiguity to its fullest degree. A skill that David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is missing although the film is confident it has. It Follows goes heavy on creepy nuances, which benefits the experience. Nothing…
By: Addison Wylie Mary Dore’s She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is a solid film, and joins the ranks of other docs that remind us of how unbalanced the past was through. The documentation stuns and embarrasses, but Dore sticks with professionalism and avoids turning her film into a shame project. Dore reinforces the power of communication in critical times. Before feminism was taken seriously, women who felt discriminated were often ignored. A female character type was established…