The horror genre relies, to an extent, on the utilization of familiar tropes. The use of these tropes can reward and subvert expectations, and how these tropes are used contributes to the film’s effectiveness. Audience familiarity is both an opportunity and a difficulty for filmmakers: Give the audience what they want and they welcome it,…
When looking upon the first frame of Paradise Hills, the feature directorial debut of Spanish filmmaker Alice Waddington, your eyes are thrown into a wonderland of bizarre beauty. With a crisp sci-fi world of equal parts whimsy and despair, this feminist fairy tale has all of the looks of something remarkable, but lacks the proper…
Have you ever had one of those dreams when you wake up in a room you don’t recognize, and there’s not a person to be found? You run desperately through the empty corridors, shouting for help and no one answers? It’s like the beginning of zombie horror classic “28 Days Later,” but the only gnawing…
If the mind of “National Lampoon’s Vacation” director, Harold Ramis, was to morph with the unkempt, lewd intellect of Bob Saget or Louis C.K., you’d have the framework for We’re the Millers. It mixes harmless family humor with blandly offensive material, creating a slapstick comedy that, against what some may think is a good mix,…
4.3.2.1.. The title of this multi-threaded thriller gives the impression that a timer is counting down the seconds — maybe it is bomb methodically ticking down to Armageddon, maybe it is a rocket set to take flight to the moon. Or maybe, as in this case, it spells out the specifics of the film. There…
You know a movie, where the main plot line is skipping school, is bad when the main character tells the audience there are “rules” to such activities. And unless that character is Ferris Bueller, the viewers — for the most part — should just ignore those guidelines. I’ll even go a step further. The Art…
An updated trailer for The Art of Getting By (formerly known as “Homework”) has been made available by Fox Searchlight Pictures. It stars Freddie Highmore as George, the misunderstood boy that has yet to be challenged, and Emma Roberts as Sally, the girl who can peel away George’s shell and force him from his apathetic…
