One of the highlights of “Captain America: Civil War” is headlining his own adventure, and it looks bonkers. The teaser for Black Panther, a substantially better representation of the project than the poster, features vivid imagery, an intriguing tribal-versus-modern setting plus just enough information about a conflict that can affect more than T’Challa’s (Chadwick Boseman,…
Gridlock is a 20-minute tension-filled short built entirely from top to bottom on the hope that its twist ending can shock its audience. Everything filters through to that ending via a threadbare plot that sees a father lose his daughter in a traffic jam on a rural road surrounded by forest. The dad (Moe Dunford,…
In Delusion, Frank Parrillo (David Graziano, “A Life Not to Follow”) is a middle-aged man still coming to terms with his wife’s death three years prior. After receiving a bizarre letter from her, he begins to move on and pursue a new love life. After he initiates a relationship with a mysterious woman (Jami Tennille,…
Lady Macbeth is an exercise in contradiction. It is a costume drama, a genre long associated with restraint and composure. It is also a gothic romance, which has a long association with passion and melodrama. These generic tropes work together as the passion of the melodrama pushes against the constraints of the costume drama, often…
Here are a few things I learned from the film Baywatch: Movies adapted from television programs are almost always terrible (the few exceptions are “The Brady Bunch Movie” and the “Mission: Impossible” franchise; this also includes most films based on “Saturday Night Live” sketches); moronic writers who cannot think of clever lines or situations always…
“We are not lost, we are just finding our way” — Stephen Meek, “Meek’s Cutoff” As depicted in “Wendy and Lucy” and “Meek’s Cutoff,” Kelly Reichardt’s characters are lost without a significant guidepost to hold on to, adrift in a society in which they struggle to fit in. Based on short stories from the 2009…
In The Shepherd, we meet Anselmo (Miguel Martín, “Cell 211”) on a day much like any other in his modest, repetitive life. He wakes up in his one-room farmhouse. He feeds his precious dog Pillo, he has breakfast, he showers. He spends the day with his sheep, reading and skimming stones when time permits. He…
