Dangerous Animals has the potential to be a sleeper hit of the summer. So, it’s unfortunate Sean Byrne’s horror-thriller film has been released prematurely. But nevertheless, the film will initially attract a crowd from the squeamish to the chortling yucksters who share a mutual interest – everybody loves a shark movie. While Byrne’s movie has plenty of deep sea casualties, the film’s secret sauce is the star power of Jai Courtney; a comment that could be…
Based on Adam Cesare’s popular YA novel of the same name, Clown in a Cornfield is a mishmash of pseudo comedic and horror elements, but it doesn’t come together as a cohesive horror-comedy. Director Eli Craig (Tucker & Dale vs. Evil) is given an array of teenage anti-heroes; a clan of “bad apples” who have given their town an infamous reputation from phoney online videos featuring a ghoulish, stalking clown named Frendo. When they begin to be…
As usual, considering that Durga Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse is based on Francoise Sagan’s novel of the same name, I can’t comment on how faithful this movie is to its source material. However, considering how unsatisfied I was by the end credits, I did some research to understand the film’s relation to the novel. Suddenly, the stars aligned and I figured out the root of my agitation. Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse was published in 1954, predating the French New Wave…
Academy Award nominee May December and, now, Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils are cut from the same cloth. Yet, I don’t know how to classify these types of heightened melodramas. These movies are not outright funny, but they have strange moments that are so deliberately jarring, the audience can’t help but giggle out of confusion. While this is a unique concoction, and can help the filmmaker achieve a specific brand of campiness, juxtaposing heavy themes within this…
Last Halloween, Netflix released a short spin-off of Sing featuring the animated cast taking part in a fairly faithful recreation of John Landis’ iconic music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. It was an innocuous distraction, fit for the season, that introduced kids to zombies. Any kid who was interested, entertained, or joyfully spooked by that short film should make Night of the Zoopocalypse their next watch. It’s basically a longer version of that short film except, in this…
Primarily coming from a background in television and documentary filmmaking, for his feature-length effort Last Breath, director/co-writer Alex Parkinson adapts one of his docs of the same name that chronicled this same story of a stranded and submerged saturation diver. During some underwater pipeline maintenance, a disruption leads to a snagged, and ultimately severed, oxygen supply for the diver. As his team works to save him, the diver tries to conserve the last of his…
By: Addison Wylie After being lauded for his work as a documentarian on The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, I suppose Joshua Oppenheimer was itching to cash in some clout; deciding to do so with an apocalyptic musical titled The End. Sporting impressive art direction and a well-regarded cast including Tilda Swinton (I’m Not Here), Michael Shannon (The Night Before) and George MacKay (1917), Oppenheimer fuses components of a survival thriller, a dynasty drama, and…
Conclave is an efficient chamber piece; evoking curiousities of how a pope is chosen as well as suggesting what cutthroat decisions happen before smoke bellows out of the Vatican to update the unsuspecting public. Overseen by Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes of The Menu), the voting procedures that follow the death of a former pope strike Lawrence at a time of doubting his faith. He keeps this vulnerability close to his chest, but is called…
By: Addison Wylie Preceding an amicable exchange between ex-lovers, Andy Goodrich (Michael Keaton) is asked by his former wife Ann (Andie MacDowell) how he’s doing. “I’m okay,” Andy answers. “You’re always okay,” Ann teases. She isn’t wrong. Throughout Goodrich, the audience observes Andy doing okay. He occasionally has an awkward conversation that sometimes references his past as a flawed father but, otherwise, he’s a well-respected and levelheaded dude.
The assumption to presume there’s a personal connection between director Ellen Kuras and photographer Lee Miller, the subject of Kuras’ feature-length narrative debut Lee, isn’t that rash. An obvious interest for camerawork is shared between Kuras and Miller, and the passion for the craft may have also rubbed off on star Kate Winslet (who Kuras has worked with previously on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and A Little Chaos, and is credited as an executive producer on Lee). …