Protocol 7 answers that scenario that we’ve all played out in our head – what if a doctor made a Hollywood legal thriller? Director Andy Wakefield, a former physician and documentarian who is also an adamant anti-vaccine activist, makes his feature-length narrative debut with Protocol 7. The movie may fare better than his menacing doc, Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, but that’s also damning with faint praise.
By: Trevor Chartrand Insane Like Me? is the first feature film from director Chip Joslin, who also wrote the script with the movie’s star, Britt Bankhead. This lackluster thriller has a number of faults, most of which are hard to ignore.
Ted Betz’s directorial debut, Escape Through Africa, is an ambitious action romp – but a limited budget and unpolished script make for a tedious viewing experience.
The Surprise Visit features a small ensemble of actors who seem to be challenging each other. Only they’re not inspiring each other, they’re competing against each other for who can exaggerate the most. And director Nick Lyon is letting his cast “duke it out”.
The synopsis of Blackbear vaguely reminds one of the 2006 film Annapolis–a film that, if you recall (and if so, good for you), was marketed as a recruit training film in the vein of A Gentleman and an Officer, but was actually, secretly, a boxing film. Blackbear is similar: it starts off as a war film, with the two central characters as captives by ISIS, only to quickly become a boxing film within the film’s…
Gail Harvey’s latest movie Never Saw It Coming has a title so unintentionally fitting, it makes my head spin.
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.
Out of all the dramedies I can remember, Moments of Clarity has the murkiest line separating what’s supposed to be funny and what’s supposed to be taken seriously. It’s the most uncomfortable moviegoing experience of 2016.
Just like staring at an inkblot, “random” and “strange” are the first words that spring to mind if I had to describe Frank D’Angelo’s Sicilian Vampire to movie goers. However, the oddities give D’Angelo’s film a fever dream allure – it’s entertaining one way or another.