The juxtaposition of comedy, tragedy and horror is a tricky thing to pull off. Lean too hard one way and the comedy can be inappropriate or just lame and unfunny. Lean another way and the tragedy can be unintentionally comical or painful. And lean the third way and the horror can be silly. Those films…
The end of a relationship is chronicled convincingly and compellingly in Danish filmmaker Kristian Håskjold’s short Forever Now. It begins with the start of a breakup and ends with, well, the end of the breakup, so there are few plot-based surprises in its compact running time that barely exceeds 15 minutes. Instead, Håskjold is content…
In Havenhurst, a recovering alcoholic takes up residence in a Gothic apartment building in an effort to locate her missing friend, herself an addict, and finds a rabbit hole worthy of Lewis Carroll himself. The movie is truly effective at bringing the scares, with an atmosphere of unease and a typically amazing performance by Fionnula…
The end of the world is a lonely proposition in Lluís Quílez’s grim 30-minute short Graffiti, about a single survivor in a post-apocalyptic city who wanders around the shell of an empty apartment complex with his dog in search of food, people, anything. Edgar (Oriol Pla, “Year of Grace”) doesn’t have a lot to live…
In “Neighboring Sounds,” Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s first feature, the focus is on the anxiety that grips a middle-class neighborhood in Recife (Brazil’s fifth largest city), that has residents so fearful of their safety that they hire security guards to protect their buildings. Also set in Recife, Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius narrows its focus to…
Observance is a difficult film to figure out, the kind that makes you wonder not what its creators are intentionally hiding from its characters and viewers, but what they have not yet figured out themselves. While it has more than its fair share of beautiful shots, dramatic hard cuts, and impressive performances, how unclear the…
The dog days of the summer schlockbusters are upon us and soon we will be inundated with mediocre and below average films such as the new “Ghostbusters,” another “Ice Age” installment and the dismal “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,” among others. Trying to fight this deluge, though, is the animated feature from Universal Pictures…
