By: Addison Wylie That title is a turn off, but (Dis)Honesty – The Truth About Lies is an enthralling investigative film that will hopefully serve as a role model for documentarians. Duke University professor Dan Ariely speaks to a crowd of eager ears at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. He stands at the foot of the stage and explains numerous experiments his team has conducted to test society’s moral fibre and…
By: Addison Wylie Carl Boenish wanted to test the human spirit. In doing so, his willingness to jump off breathtaking heights pioneered what we know now as “BASE jumping”. Filmmaker Marah Strauch has matched Boenish’s go-getter attitude and gumption with Sunshine Superman, a documentary about the jumper’s fearless outlook and how he serves as an inspiration for adventure and living life to its fullest. If you’ve seen James Marsh’s Man on Wire, you’ll sense Marah…
By: Trevor Jeffery Over the past few decades, the biopic has been more or less perfected and recreated over and over, to the point of boring predictability. While ultimately Love & Mercy is no exception, the film deviates from the structure enough to make the journey feel like a new, albeit shaky, perspective on the formula. Following Beach Boy Brian Wilson, the film jumps between the 20-something-prodigy Wilson in the 1960s (played by Paul Dano)…
By: Addison Wylie I went into After the Ball already admiring three of its main stars: director Sean Garrity, co-writer Kate Melville, and actress Portia Doubleday. After the Ball isn’t a type of film I get excited to see, but these are three people I’ve been wanting to see more of ever since they’re strong debuts. Garrity impressed me with his slow burn drama Blood Pressure, yet temporarily lost me when his filmmaking pizazz was…
By: Mark Barber Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger was something of a phantom, often disappearing into one of the many nooks and crannies of his own home. Yet, what makes Giger so unique and compelling–both as an artist and as a person–is another elusive phantom in Belinda Sallin’s Dark Star: HR Giger’s World. Dark Star disappoints not in its reasonably zealous adoration of Giger’s cyborg nightmares, but in its simplistic analytical approach to both himself and…
By: Addison Wylie Patch Town is royally ambitious. It’s also incredibly hard to synopsize making it harder to recommend despite it being a highly enjoyable live-action fairy tale. Craig Goodwill, a filmmaker who’s been comfortable making short films, expanded on his original short Patch Town and adapted it into a real nifty feature. He’s drawn on David Lynch’s Eraserhead to define the film’s industrial dystopia where obedient workers withdrawal babies from heads of cabbage. All…
By: Addison Wylie As someone who is a follower of Sesame Street’s history and a fan of Caroll Spinney, I feel I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story was speaking directly to me and other admirers who may fall in the same categories as I do. Kids may connect with Spinney’s Big Bird, but Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker’s documentary is meant to click with those who grew up with the child-like muppet; as…
By: Addison Wylie Movies like Debug make me wish I had a notebook handy during screenings. I feel overwhelmed trying to remember all of the sci-fi mumbo-jumbo that fills David Hewlett’s futuristic space horror. Let’s just say Hewlett’s self-penned script has expiatory dialoguing of the laziest kind. Science fiction often hosts the worst scenarios since some filmmakers just want to hurl a bunch of technical nonsense towards the audience and expect movie goers will be…
By: Trevor Jeffery Using the words “unabashed” and “propaganda” together seems redundant, but there isn’t a better way to describe James McTeigue’s Survivor. Kate Abbott (Mila Jovovich) is an officer with the US embassy in London. While on duty, Kate asks a few too many questions to a man she suspects to be (and actually is) a bio-terrorist, before letting him through customs. This sets him and his associates into freak-out mode, and they hire an…
By: Addison Wylie Early on in Results, two workout trainers are telling the other not to provoke them. These two trainers are Trevor and Kat, played by Guy Pearce and Cobie Smulders. Over the course of Andrew Bujalski’s film, the audience finds out that these two characters need to be provoked in order for them to be challenged, which in turn makes Results interesting. The person who does most of the poking and prodding is…