In late 1974, a young man brutally murdered each of his family members with a shotgun in the middle of the night. He killed his parents, his two brothers, and his two sisters, some of whom were determined to have been awake at the time of his entry to their rooms. When questioned, Ronald DeFeo…
The eponymous academy around which The Atticus Institute revolves, as we are told early on (via ominous letters on the screen, an info-dump technique frequently employed by mockumentary and found footage films), was founded by Dr. Henry West (William Mapother, “I Origins”) in order to study “psi-related phenomena,” such as clairvoyance and telekinesis, until it…
Last summer, director James Wan gave us a terrifying dramatization of a true haunting in Burrillville, Rhode Island in “The Conjuring” and scared the pants off summer moviegoers. Yet again, his quality horror moviemaking transformed into huge box office payouts and introduced the world at-large to paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. Renowned in the…
Jorge Dorado knows a thing or two about memory and time. The Spanish director worked with the legendary Pedro Almodóvar on such films as “Talk To Her” in 2002 and “Bad Education” in 2004, and now on his own addresses the power of the mind in his feature debut with the sensual thriller Anna. The…
Every now and then, there comes a film that reaffirms our quelling desire to be at the movies, or to watch as we sit back on the couch with an addictive bag of popcorn. The Conjuring is one of those films. With old-school scares, stellar camerawork and commendable acting, this film — though formulaic —…
Ah, the bungled bank robbery movie. A movie that could have done with a cameo appearance from Eileen Brennan, Flypaper at least adds a slight kink in its comedy presentation, which results in it being slightly fresher than it perhaps could have been. A bank is being robbed, the heist goes wrong, and the perpetrators…
One bank. Two gangs of bank robbers. Same time and day. That makes for one helluva scenario, especially when crafted in the hands of the boys who wrote “The Hangover.” As the trailer for Flypaper shows, it gets awfully complicated and comical — one gang is made up of professional thieves, the other is a…
