A spooky seaman’s tale, The Isle screened at Norwich Film Festival in 2018 with an introduction from co-writer and director Matthew Butler-Hart. Butler-Hart describes the film as influenced by slow-burn horror of the 1970s, and he also spoke about the inspiration for the story — Eilean Shona, an island off the coast of Scotland that…
Zoë Kravitz’s (“Rough Night”) character in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Leta Lestrange, tells the franchise’s bashful hero, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, “The Danish Girl”), “You never met a monster you couldn’t love.” The line is actually quite interchangeable with the film itself. While the narrative is somewhat of a slog, there is just…
For anyone willing to get into the Christmas spirit immediately after Halloween (that would be me, at least this year), there’s the arrival of Disney’s festive fantasia The Nutcracker and the Four Realms to help ease the transition from one treat-filled holiday to another. The title may be a mouthful, but the movie is a…
Wouldn’t you know it, another faceless dystopian drama featuring teens situated in manufactured peril courtesy of the distrust and paranoia of the older establishment has made an appearance. After all, Hollywood must be vigilant in its continued efforts to tap into the teen movie-going market (this time courtesy of Alexandra Bracken’s 2012 novel “The Darkest…
“I feel like I am the moon, so bright. But after a while, the brightness is fading away” — Tantra The Persian poet Rumi said, “The nature of reality is this: It is hidden, and it is hidden, and it is hidden” In Bali, Sekala and Niskala refer to the everyday world we see through…
If you feel that your body holds two distinct personalities, perhaps one public and the other private, you are not alone. Many people display different sides of their personality at different times. For most people, however, the condition, what might be described as the “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” syndrome, can be classified as “psychological”…
German Angst is a movie for the “V/H/S,” “Zombieworld,” “The ABCs of Death” crowd in that it is technically a collection of three shorter films — “Final Girl,” “Make a Wish,” and “Alraune,” respectively — full of extreme violence and horrific fun. With “Final Girl” as a quiet, graphic, and personal revenge fantasy, “Make a…
