The title is a lot more intriguing than this movie ended up being. A solid cast of names at the top, lead by Willem Dafoe and Nicolas Cage doesn’t overcome the lack of substance in the plot. A group crazed…
Movie Review: Loving
Jeff Nichols directs films with the steadiness and dexterity of a great novelist. Feeling little pressure to rely on expository dialogue or to drive the action forward without cause, Nichols creates his immersive worlds through his ability to craft organic…
Movie Review: Arrival
Director Denis Villeneuve has come back after his slightly under cooked Sicario with a film best experienced totally immersed. While Arrival is being touted as a “thinking mans science fiction film” (and to a point, it is) the film is also at it’s best when…
Movie Review: The Windmill
I was honestly going to give Nick Jongerius’s The Windmill a good review. It’s a slasher film, but despite much critical bickering, that in itself is no sin. And while it gleefully indulges in wanton splatter—heads crush like melons under…
Movie Review: Miss Hokusai
Miss Hokusai doesn’t explore an artist’s plight so much as it explores a certain plight that effects every living person. O-Ei Hokusai, a great painter, lives in the shadow of her father’s accomplishments, resigned—as his daughter—to play second fiddle. The anime opens introducing not…
VIFF 2016 #2: The Other Half, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, Searchers
To read previous VIFF coverage, click here. The Other Half The Other Half is an impressionistic piece of debut filmmaking, a practice in turning the unconventional dramatic methods of great directors into a doctrine for newer ones. Despite Justin Klein…
NYFF Review: Fire at Sea
I remember the exact moment when Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea lost me. In an extended sequence, a young boy growing up on Lampedusa—a tiny Italian island almost 8 square miles large—goes to a doctor’s appointment. The doctor grills him…