When looking at Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler’s Radium Girls, it’s easy to be stuck at a cinematic fork in the road. The film features a cast of delightful up and comers (including Joey King of “The Act”) and is inspired by a true story filled with relevant energy. Yet when examining the final…
“Blackbird singing in the dead of night. Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.” — Paul McCartney, “Blackbird” For most parents, the process of letting go of grown children is difficult under normal circumstances, but for children with special needs, it can…
Lance (Patrick Schwarzenegger, “Daniel Isn’t Real”), an unemployed college graduate travels to Chicago at the behest of a cousin and the promise of a job only to be drawn into a tight-knit cadre of millennials who express their frustrations at a broken system by robbing rich people. The viewpoint of these criminal masterminds is that…
The Democratic National Convention met in Chicago in August 1968 to choose their presidential candidate in a tumultuous year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Prague Spring, and growing protests in cities around the world against the escalation of the Vietnam War. Although…
The slasher film and stand-up comedy have some commonalities. Both rely on suspense and release, in one case the release being laughter and in the other, fear. Both can build up suspense with short sequences, be that a feedline/punchline structure or a jump scare; both can also escalate tension with a long form story leading…
Cinema can have a suffusive effect. Through a particular combination of image and sound, a film can feel as though it is breathing out and enveloping you with its influence. This can be the case with dreamy romances, where you are brought into the (potentially cloying) environment of overpowering love. It can also work for…
Christopher Smith is a modern-day horror maestro. From his feature debut “Creep” through “Severance” and “Black Death,” with forays into other genres, he has demonstrated his ability to make effective genre films. The Banishing is a very fine horror: A slow burn, drip feed delivery of menace and dread that also explores issues of repression…
