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…
Never Let Go should have been jettisoned before it even got past the pitch meeting. Borrowing from an endless supply of 80s-era Cold War thrillers, Never Let Go makes the crucial mistake of combining lame acting, a nonsense script, and boring musical choices into an utterly forgettable — if unintentionally hilarious — action movie. Angela…
After a summer slew of big-budget studio films, it can be difficult to find, sit down and watch a movie with more modest origins. Yet for the second time in a row, director Christopher Di Nunzio manages to cross that threshold and craft an engaging narrative around seemingly finite resources. His latest, A Life Not…
Europe, the years immediately preceding World War 2. Laura (Natalie Portman, “Jackie”) and Kate (Lily-Rose Depp, “Yoga Hosers”) are sisters who have been trekking around the continent performing their psychic act; Laura is the host, and Kate the one who actually communicates with the spirits. They work hard and are good at what they do,…
Zombie films have always been hotbeds of teeth-gnashing, blood splatter and almost the origin of stellar gore effects in cinema. But classics of the subgenre such as Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” and George Romero’s “Dead Series” have equally served as sociological petri dishes in which the filmmakers examine our own societies. While this breed…
Madness has been a hallmark in Darren Aronofsky’s films (“Black Swan”), and it might be at its most feverish hour here in his upcoming mother!. Fittingly for a (deliciously secretive) psychological horror-thriller, Paramount Pictures, at midnight, released a full-length trailer for it, which has everything to cause the senses to panic. As the violin whips…
With Detroit, Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) and her team have put together a kick-in-the-mouth, knock-your-socks-off movie experience you won’t forget in a docudrama staging of the Detroit race-riots of 1967. Starting with a routine police raid of an illegal after hours club where the local residents harass the police as they…
