What do you do when you’ve made multiple successful films in New Zealand, graduated to Hollywood blockbuster franchise installments while maintaining your idiosyncrasies and then won an Academy Award? In the case of Taika Waititi, the answer is to make another blockbuster where the idiosyncrasies are even more pronounced, to an extent that may amuse…
White Lie opens with protagonist Katie Arneson (Kacey Rohl, “Red Riding Hood”) shaving her head. Combined with the title, this opening scene may well prompt the viewer to form an initial interpretation. While this first impression may be proved right, the film subsequently goes in several unexpected directions, probing deep and prompting unexpected reactions. Katie…
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (“Gods of Egypt”) stars as Max, an insurance detective with a growing tumor in his brain. As part of one of his investigations, Max discovers a place called The Aurora, sort of a bespoke-assisted-suicide facilitator. The place seems outwardly helpful but maintains quite the mysterious aura. What method does one wish for one’s…
In the current stressful climate of cautious people keeping their safe distance from one another because of a crippling pandemic, it is bewildering to think an off-the-wall, road trip sex comedy involving mismatched personalities would suffice to ease the blues of quarantine. Nonetheless, co-writer/director Nico Raineau’s loose-minded sex farce, Hooking Up, looks to do just…
Most Christian faith-based films mean well and have the best of intentions in terms of the inspiration it preaches to its targeted audiences. However, filmmaking brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin (“I Can Only Imagine”) go so much further, delivering with odd conviction, a saccharine-coated, religious-themed love story that taps more sap than that found in…
The camera loves Sam Elliott, and why not? He has a tall, lean body with thick gray, unruly hair hanging over a furrowed brow, a trademark horseshoe mustache to go along with dark chest hair; it all blends so well with the unforgettable masculinity in his deep, golden voice that seems to descend directly from…
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…
