Interestingly Death Wish, the millennial-era remake of the gritty mid 70’s crime thriller of the same name, notoriously arrives in theaters at an increasingly awkward moment in a divisive national climate (particularly in the aftermath of the most recent high school shooting) where the political stakes regarding gun violence in America are at an all-time…
Midway through The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, in the midst of a breakdown (breakthrough?), surrounded by his typewriter and empty bottles and strewn about pages, signifiers of talent devolving into madness, the successful yet troubled novelist at its center self-consciously admits to having recently written only “first lines and first pages. No middle. No end.”…
I enjoyed writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits well enough at first. Yet as my chronological distance from the project increases, so too do my annoyances with its gender power dynamics. The film follows six very specific Brooklynites whose lives are vaguely intertwined and then thrown into further disarray when a young, beautiful Australian disrupts…
It is fitting that there are two competing readings of François Ozon’s Double Lover. The film dually presents as a highly stylized, seductively sleek French psychosexual thriller and this “I Know Who Killed Me”-esque overtly overly symbolic camp. Not wanting to assign one dominance over the other or perhaps unable to distinguish between apparent equals,…
Despite being a relatively well-made, exceedingly well-acted film, Submission has a litany of significant and fundamental flaws that simply cannot be ignored. Written and directed by Richard Levine, the film is based on Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel, and tells the tale of Ted Swenson (Stanley Tucci, “Transformers: Age of Extinction”), an author and creative…
There are many variables transpiring in the gritty, yet grating, urban crime flick Proud Mary that want desperately to embrace themes of unconventional motherly instincts and clichéd street-wise mayhem. Unfortunately for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” Oscar-nominated star Taraji P. Henson (who also has an executive producing credit for this lopsided actioner), her labored…
As you’ve grown up, have you ever been ostracized from other children, for whatever reason? Maybe you were the kid who smelled, or wore thick glasses. Maybe you simply liked things that weren’t cool enough for elementary school status quo. Children generally have little-to-no sense of empathy when they’re that young, and so school can…
