Jess (Katee Sackhoff, “Oculus”), a reformed drug addict, is trying to reclaim her daughter Chloe (Lucy Boynton, “The Blackcoat’s Daughter”) from the children’s home. Chloe, still angry at the desertion years earlier, is in no hurry to return to her birth mother. Yet one night, after an adventure gone wrong with her boyfriend, Chloe becomes…
1947, and Sheriff Proctor (Danny Goldring, “The Dark Knight”) and Deputy Waterhouse (Ted Levine, “Bleed for This”) are busy dumping two bodies in a lake. After the deed is done, Waterhouse fires Proctor without firing a shot. 30 years later, an elderly Waterhouse is sheriff. His granddaughter, Jacqueline “Jake” Mather (Samantha Isler, “Captain Fantastic”), visits…
The word that will be most often used to describe Across the River, a movie about two ex-lovers spending a few hours together on the streets of London, is small. We often use the word small these days to describe movies that don’t involve superheroes or CGI, what Siskel & Ebert used to refer to…
Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey., the latest film from Ate De Jong — the Dutch veteran director whose career goes back to and beyond “Drop Dead Fred” — is a raw, creepy, silly, and ultimately fairly powerful captive thriller. De Jong makes good use of his deliberately bland single location and draws intense performances from his small,…
This latest Disney picture, Beauty and the Beast, joins a growing list of live-action movies which traces its origins to animated films, including “The Jungle Book,” “Pete’s Dragon,” “Cinderella” and “Maleficent,” among others. The bar here, however, is just a bit higher, considering the 1991 edition became the first animated feature to earn a Best…
At the point in which Yoshiki, musical ombudsman, drummer, keyboardist/pianist and main songwriter of the Xtremely popular X Japan (simply X in Japan, though not in Japanese, for this is no ideogram, but only an alphabetic, apathetic X), Xtremely so in their Pacific archipelago, mythical prophets in their own land . . . at the…
Social media giant Instagram receives some light ribbing in Martin Sofiedal’s four minute short, Instapocalypse, which suggests that a world-ruining zombie apocalypse was actually caused by the public’s unhealthy obsession with their smartphones. This is all a comical setup, established in a clunky piece of expository dialogue, on which to hang a single scene where…
