When I visited Spain for the first time many years ago, I immediately felt a sense of foreboding, as if I was being reminded of some long buried event, perhaps in another lifetime. Everything that happened during my stay there did nothing to dispel those feelings either and I have never gone back. Of course,…
Michael (Jack Parry-Jones, “Our Girl” TV series) and Thor (Christy O’Donnell) are brothers. Well, as they would be the first to tell you, step-brothers. They live with Michael’s mum and Thor’s dad in a little house on Shetland. When Michael doesn’t get into university in Glasgow and his girlfriend does, he starts to get suspicious…
Filmmaker Aldo Iuliano uses a portentous soccer match in his short film Penalty to highlight the hellish efforts of embattled Syrian citizens to flee their country across the Mediterranean. Iuliano’s aim is to put a human face on the refugee and immigrant crisis, where the political issues of the situation give way to a poignant…
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…
If there was one word that could accurately describe all the different aspects of Dave Made a Maze, that word would be “creative.” Far too many films lack originality, instead choosing to churn out tried-and-tested formulas that typically do well at the box office, so it’s truly refreshing to come across a directorial debut that…
There are so many routes that Sidemen: Long Road to Glory could have taken, many of which, indeed, are taken, yet so they are without any one specific focus — other than its characters. Unlike the documentary, the three main characters of this story, the enigmatic Pinetop Perkins, the lively Hubert Sumlin, or the ever-glowing…
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…
