The Katyn Massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish nationals carried out by the Soviet secret police in April and May of 1940. Though the Soviet Union claimed that Nazi Germany had orchestrated the slaughter in 1941, it officially acknowledged responsibility for the killings in 1990, after decades of state-sponsored cover-ups. Piotr Szkopiak…
“Jay Chandrasekhar helms this wacky vehicle with all the conviction of a defective police siren . . . feels more like an excuse for Chandrasekhar and his fratboy Broken Lizard comedy troupe players to merge and serve up their pet project just to kill some time.” — Frank Ochieng’s critical take on 2001’s “Super Troopers”…
I think it’s fair to say that Last Seen in Idaho is a well-balanced, albeit cheesy, thriller. It has a straightforward plot with the expected number of twists and it includes strong, believable, even relatable lead characters who are portrayed with an acceptable level of competence. Now, I know that sentence isn’t exactly a ringing…
“Certain persons in the world exist, not as personalities in themselves, but as spots or specks on the personalities of others” — N. V. Gogol, “Dead Souls” A Gentle Creature is as Russian a creature can ever be. It is the kind of character-driven story where the protagonist is bereft of all possible character —…
It is a bold filmmaker who trusts film as film and allows the medium to communicate without recourse to exposition and dialogue. Such a filmmaker is Lynne Ramsey (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”), whose latest offering, You Were Never Really Here, is a brilliantly brutal assembly of image and sound that never displays any…
With a CRACK! that delivers aural and narrative impact, Red Sparrow lays out its cards early on. This CRACK! occurs during a ballet and highlights a key tension of such a performance — any mistake can be disastrous. In this case, the incident involving the CRACK! does prove devastating and foreshadows the ruin to come….
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.”…
