Michael (Jack Parry-Jones, “Our Girl” TV series) and Thor (Christy O’Donnell) are brothers. Well, as they would be the first to tell you, step-brothers. They live with Michael’s mum and Thor’s dad in a little house on Shetland. When Michael doesn’t get into university in Glasgow and his girlfriend does, he starts to get suspicious…
Filmmaker Aldo Iuliano uses a portentous soccer match in his short film Penalty to highlight the hellish efforts of embattled Syrian citizens to flee their country across the Mediterranean. Iuliano’s aim is to put a human face on the refugee and immigrant crisis, where the political issues of the situation give way to a poignant…
Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water,” Wind River is a murder mystery about the death of a young Native American women, found frozen in the snow. Part character study, part police procedural, and part political statement, it is a deeply disturbing film that contains graphic…
From “Black Christmas” through “Silent Night, Deadly Night” and onto “Krampus,” there is a fine tradition of Christmas-themed horrors running through the decades, and Red Christmas, the feature debut from writer-director Craig Anderson, fits comfortably into the canon. The Christian festival of family and giving is the perfect backdrop for an ultra-violent cautionary tale about…
There are four words that everyone should know in their respective language: Don’t mess with mama. That goes for bears (or other wild animals) and in this particular case, Halle Berry (Oscar winner, “Monster’s Ball”). Berry returns to the screen with Kidnap, an action-thriller about a blue-collar mother who does everything she can to get…
It is not often that one has reservations about a movie adaptation of an epic Stephen King novel series. Sure, there have been a few misses along the way (bound to happen considering how large King’s bibliography is), but it has been quite some time that a movie-going mishap has registered so profoundly as it…
The Hasidic tradition that a child must be raised in a household where there is both a mother and a father is one of the cultural issues brought to the fore in Joshua Z Weinstein’s bittersweet film, Menashe. Co-written by Alex Lipschultz and Musa Syeed (“A Stray”) and set in the Hasidic community in the…
