“I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and the world drops dead” — Sylvia Plath, from “Mad Girl’s Love Song” As the popular classical French love song “Plaisir d’Amour” says: “The joys of love are but a moment long. The pain of…
As a famous nanny once said, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” And in the case of actor turned director Craig Roberts latest film, Eternal Beauty, there’s a lot of sweetness to help digest this painful tale. And with such acting talents as Sally Hawkins and David Thewlis starring within it, this…
Trauma Center, a brutally dull alleged action movie that nominally stars Bruce Willis (“Glass”) as a world-weary cop, is not the kind of movie that anyone will remember in ten years, or, for that matter, even later this year. Its premise is flimsy, its execution is disjointed, its acting is atrocious, and its conclusion is…
Once upon a time (in 2017), a movie was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. Filled to the brim with stars like Richard Gere and Peter Dinklage, it promised to spin a cinematic tale based upon a famous psychiatric case study (The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach) that involved complex elements of…
The problems with Rave Party Massacre begin — but certainly do not end — with its title. For a film that purports to portray a “massacre,” the body count by the time the credits roll is alarmingly small. What makes this titular inconsistency especially strange is the fact that the film actually does deliver on…
Steven Soderbergh’s reputation as an iconic filmmaker who has retired and unretired multiple times seems contradictory when watching one of his new movies, not merely because the movie exists, but also because his work feels like the product of someone who is always moving, always trying, always doing. Much of his focus in the past…
Christopher Lawrence Chapman’s debut feature, Inoperable, is a horror film about a 30-year-old woman struggling to escape from a half-deserted hospital while “the T-rex of hurricanes” sweeps overhead. The opening titles are like a scratchy throwback to David Fincher’s “Se7en,” and the end credits splash the screen with comic book text. Neither bookend is relevant…
