Jess (Katee Sackhoff, “Oculus”), a reformed drug addict, is trying to reclaim her daughter Chloe (Lucy Boynton, “The Blackcoat’s Daughter”) from the children’s home. Chloe, still angry at the desertion years earlier, is in no hurry to return to her birth mother. Yet one night, after an adventure gone wrong with her boyfriend, Chloe becomes…
Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey., the latest film from Ate De Jong — the Dutch veteran director whose career goes back to and beyond “Drop Dead Fred” — is a raw, creepy, silly, and ultimately fairly powerful captive thriller. De Jong makes good use of his deliberately bland single location and draws intense performances from his small,…
A woman (Diana Agostini, “The Eyes of Van Gogh”) looks out the window of her remote hillside home. A strange man (Will Brill, “Girls Against Boys”) is talking to her young daughter, who was playing in the garden. She goes out to investigate. He gives her a too-bright smile and asks when her husband will…
When I first watched Gleason, at the London Film Festival back in October, there was barely anyone there. “Fair enough,” I thought. It was after all, a mid-week, lunchtime showing, and a documentary about an American football player, who few Brits will have ever heard of. By the end of the film though, the dearth…
A well-balanced blend of Prohibition-era gangster thriller, western, and vampire movie, Bloodrunners is an intriguing prospect. It’s no game-changer, and it never shakes its TV pilot aesthetic, but it wears its hybrid influences well and betrays a knowing sense of its own absurdity. It’s 1933 and everyone, from mobsters to cops, are getting tired of…
While its better scenes help to distract from these moments, clichés are still clichés, and no matter what strengths its actors might bring to the film, “Wolves” remains a bland, uninteresting drama that leaves the viewer feeling underwhelmed as its credits begin to roll.
The Ottoman Lieutenant is a modest yet powerful film, one that sweeps the viewer into its world with majestic scope, while maintaining a keen eye for detail and never offering more than it can deliver. Romance, coming of age, duty and responsibility, violence and compassion, politics and history come together in an impressive whole, captured…
