Love is about holding on to someone, but it is also about knowing when to let go. This theme defines Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de flore, his second film since the 2005 hit C.R.A.Z.Y., and one of the most poignant films in recent memory. Not only does Café de flore repeat Vallée’s earlier success, but goes…
The primary creative force behind Lady Magdalene’s, J. Neil Schulman, may be somewhat of a successful novelist, but he cannot in good conscience add filmmaking to his list of credentials. While Schulman wants you to believe that Lady Magdalene’s is a smart action-comedy satirizing today’s post-9/11 climate, the resulting picture is actually an agonizing catastrophe;…
Relaxing at night, after a hard day at work and a few hours online, tending to emails, website modifications, correspondence, and creative things, amongst the best things to do, if too tired to read a book, is to watch a film. But, not a fictive film, but a documentary where, even if the film is…
When viewing the primal landscape of the beautiful country of Rwanda, it is hard to imagine that only a short time ago the land was awash with the blood of 800,000 people. No film more fully captures the residual pain resulting from the 1994 genocide than Munyurangabo, an intimate and deeply moving first feature from…
I may be going soft in my old age. A documentary about a man learning to be a Santa Claus, and I give it a perfect score? Yes, I gave it a one, and if zero were better I’d give it that. I’ve watched many a cruel movie this year; too many times I’ve watched…
Based on an actual racial incident in Gothenburg, Sweden in which a group of black teenagers carried out a series of thefts of other children’s personal belongings for a period of two years, Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s Play is about using psychological game playing rather than name-calling, threats, or overt violence to bully your target….
It is rare to see movie walk outs; people will usually stick out rough films until the end because they willingly paid to be there. It is rarer still to see walk outs in an art house theater because the patrons typically have more experienced expectations on contemplative and metaphorical features. The Turin Horse will…
