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,…
“Life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud” — Yann Martel, Life of Pi Moments of crisis can bring a family closer together but can just as easily rip them apart. In first-time director Elizabeth Chomko’s What They Had,…
Granted we’ve all enjoyed our fair share of them, but it is still a nice change of pace to watch a Hollywood film that isn’t one of those big budget, high-stakes films with product placements, massive CGI explosions and recycled plots. Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman is a tour-de-force western on the opposite side of…
If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear Garry Marshall was trying to break the unofficial record he set in “Valentine’s Day” by jamming even more A and B-list actors into his new romantic comedy New Year’s Eve. The ultimate result is they are all a part of your basic multi-threaded movie that intertwines the…
Sometimes movie critics will re-evaluate a film years later to determine if there was something better or worse that they missed during the first viewing. That happened to me for the horror film, The Shining (during round two, I clued in on more of the nuances and thus liked the film much more than I…
I once had the misfortunate of watching a Lifetime television special and because of this I was forced to use a tampon for the rest of the week. Going one step further, Tony Goldwyn’s Conviction, which has been advertised as the perfect Oscar-bait, kicked me square in the balls and sent me straight to menopause….
Pitch to Hollywood studio stooge: “You see, I’ve got this idea to do a film about a real life event, except the film will only feature about ten minutes of the real life event, as a sort of ‘in’ to get the suckers to come and drop ten bucks. Meanwhile, what we’ll do is make…
