As the title Gone suggests, something or someone has disappeared. When Jill Parrish (Amanda Seyfried) comes home from working the night shift at the diner she finds that her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) has been abducted from her bed. This triggers horrible memories for Jill, who was herself abducted from her bed the previous year….
What some people wouldn’t do for cash. In Killer Joe dimestore drug dealer Chris puts a hit out on his mother for her life insurance policy and offers up his sister to the hitman as collateral. In his defense, though, if he doesn’t come up with some cash he’s a dead man. But maybe death…
In the opening shot of Richard Linklater’s Bernie, our eponymous protagonist (played by the infectious Jack Black), who is an assistant funeral director and mortician, warns that, “You can’t have grief tragically becoming a comedy.” Ironically, this dramedy based on a 1996 murder that shook the small town of Carthage, Texas does just that. Written…
Based on the 1952 play by Terrence Rattigan, Terence Davies meshes personal pain with the struggles of the British people to overcome the effects of a devastating war in his latest film, The Deep Blue Sea. Known as the British Terence Malick, Davies has directed only seven films in the last 35 years including masterpieces…
Viewing The Lucky One was a very frustrating experience. On one hand, the story (by Will Fetters, based upon the novel by Nicholas “The Notebook” Sparks) is an often compelling tale of love, war and broken and healing hearts. On the other, however, there are so many instances where direction (by Scott Hicks, “Snow Falling…
Damsels in Distress is perhaps the most pretentious screenplay ever filmed. I imagine there was a more comprehensible first draft and then writer/director Whit Stillman (“The Last Days of Disco”) pulled the thesaurus off the shelf and went to work. These damsels come across more as ridiculous caricatures than actual flesh and blood characters; nobody…
One of my closest friends goes on regular hunting trips with his family. Nothing earth shattering there — they, as most hunters, tend to hunt for Bambi’s extended family for sport or food (although I found it particularly strange that, although he’s not a taxidermist, he once kept a deer head in his refrigerator for…
