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A B-actioner with grade-A action seems like a cinematic contradiction, but what better way to describe “John Wick” and its sparkling new sequel? The cheesy one-liners, stock villains, thin plot, and characters built entirely on an actor’s presence all put John Wick: Chapter 2 in B-ish territory (an easier place for shoot-em-up pics to find…
Paul Verhoeven is back with more scratchy sexual politics, darkly comic innuendos, and harshly nasty violence. First things first, the most joyous part of that sentence is the beginning. Paul Verhoeven is back. Not back to Hollywood, of course, which he left nearly 17 years ago after the dismal response to his schlocky invisibility thriller…
School movies, as a general rule of thumb, can usually be counted on to feature either an inspirational teacher or a terrible one. There’s little room for in-between. Kristóf Deák’s dramatic short Sing (Mindenki) opts for the latter, telling the tale of a kids’ school choir in Budapest that’s run by perfectionist singing teacher, Miss…
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…
With a cut and a kick and an upbeat note, Damien Chazelle sure paints a pretty picture of classic Hollywood musical nostalgia, but La La Land is more plastic pastiche than poignant portrait. It’s a technical marvel that’s dramatically weightless, a boldly bravura effort from writer/director Damien Chazelle and his crew that’s also too cutesy…
Two bad decisions irrevocably alter the lives of two families when a pair of police officers pull over a suspicious vehicle on a forest road in Felix Ahrens’ taut, tense, terrific short Where the Woods End. What first seems simple shatters into several jagged pieces of moral complexity, all because the driver of the pulled-over…
It’s an uncomfortably heavy 13-minute stretch that Konrad Tho Fiedler fills in Running Eagle to tell the brief, though highly evocative tale of a young Native American woman (Devery Jacobs, “Rhymes for Young Ghouls”) struggling to get back home across a frozen wasteland after fleeing a life of forced prostitution. The narrative is split between…
