After a tragedy, a countdown subtly begins as to when a filmmaker will try to document the event’s emotions and peril in a movie. The act of making a movie about Aurora, Colorado’s massacre during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises never occurred to me. Then again, I also didn’t expect Patriot’s Day, a film about the Boston Marathon bombing released four years after the attack.
In Frank D’Angelo’s The Red Maple Leaf, special agent Alfonso Palermo (D’Angelo) asks potential suspects to “indulge him” during interrogations. I’ve heard some describe D’Angelo’s filmmaking as indulgent, which is why I smirked whenever Palermo asked this. Whether this was a cheeky wink toward critics is a mystery, and will probably remain unanswered.
Kiss and Cry is a lovely Canadian companion to Josh Boone’s crowd-pleaser The Fault in Our Stars.
Often, you’ll hear a film criticized for having a premise that’s more suited for a short film rather than a feature-length movie. Filmmaker Saul Pincus, who has a background in making shorts, has surely caught wind of this comment because you can see the mechanics in his latest breakout indie Nocturne try to dodge this nitpick.
Short Stay is a barely releasable anti-movie, yet writer/director Ted Fendt – a short film storyteller – probably classifies his feature-length debut as a success.
It would be unprofessional to make guesses on what compelled Katie Holmes to make All We Had based on what we know from tabloid magazine headlines. However, it’s hard not to assume when audiences observe the mother-daughter bonding of Holmes and breakout actress Stefania Owen.
The Blair Witch Project inspired independent filmmakers and the found footage genre – the resourceful film perfectly executed psychological horror. Blair Witch, the semi-sequel-reboot released this year, delved into the franchise’s psychological lore, but also fancied being somewhat of a creature feature with broader scares.
Though magic realism isn’t anything new in cinema, there are few original scripts that get the genre right as deftly as Two Lovers and a Bear, the indie romance/drama that premiered earlier this year at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Reviewing films from the Legless Corpse collection is becoming a thankless task. How else do you describe these titles that are oh-so obviously made for the close-knit amateurs that make these low-budget indies?
